JOSHUA BELL – one of the legends in today’s music world, widely known beyond the circle of music aficionados, renowned from stage and screen, from his numerous recordings and versatile artistic and social appearances. His wide-ranging biography seems to mark the possible high points in a musician’s journey in terms of achievements, awards, positions, popularity… In a career spanning almost forty years, the Grammy Award winner has performed with virtually every major orchestra in the world and continues his intensely creative life today as soloist, chamber musician, conductor and music director of Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
Among the highlights in his 2023/24 season is the international tour of his new project, The Elements, featuring works by renowned composers who present the five elements – Jake Heggie (Fire), Jennifer Higdon (Air), Edgar Meyer (Water), Jessie Montgomery (Space) and Kevin Puts (Earth), performed with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the New York and Hong Kong Philharmonics, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony Orchestra.
Bell’s 2023 release by Sony Classic, Butterfly Lovers, features the eponymous Violin Concerto by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, newly arranged for a traditional Chinese orchestra conducted by Tsung Yeh.
This season, the outstanding musician has served as Artist-in-Residence of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, guest soloist of the National Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, European Chamber Orchestra and others. He has also led the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields on tour in Australia and throughout the United States.
Joshua Bell was appointed Music Director of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Academy in 2011, succeeding Sir Neville Marriner who formed the orchestra in 1959. Bell’s artistic history with the Academy dates back to 1986, when he first recorded the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos with the orchestra under Marriner’s baton. He has since conducted the orchestra himself on several releases, including Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies, an all-Bach album, Brahms’ From Love to Brahms, and Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, for which the violinist was nominated for a 2019 Grammy Award.
Amidst the lockdown in the summer of 2020, the national American radio (PBS) presents Joshua Bell in the show “At Home With Music,” produced entirely indoors by Tony and Emmy Award-winning director Dori Berinstein. The program featured classic repertoire as well as new arrangements of favorites, including a mix of West Side Story. Featured guest performers included Larisa Martinez, Jeremy Denk, Peter Dugan and Kamal Khan. In August 2020, Sony Classical released an additional companion album to the special CD, Joshua Bell: At Home With Music (Live), in which Bell premieres newly commissioned works by John Corigliano, Edgar Meyer, Behzad Ranjbaran, and Nicholas Maw, as well as his Grammy Award-winning recording of Maw’s Violin Concerto.
He has performed alongside musicians such as Renée Fleming, Chick Corea, Regina Spektor, Wynton Marsalis, Chris Botti, Anoushka Shankar, Frankie Moreno, Josh Groban and Sting. In 2019, Bell, in trio with his longtime friends and musical partners, cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Jeremy Denk, embarked on a ten-city U.S. tour; the trio also made recordings of Mendelssohn’s piano trios, released the following season, at Capitol Studios in Hollywood.
In 1998, Bell worked with composer John Corigliano on the film soundtrack for The Red Violin, which elevated Bell to a household name and garnered Corigliano an Academy Award. Since then, Bell has appeared on several other film soundtracks, including Ladies in Lavender (2004) and Defiance (2008). Bell commemorated the 20th anniversary of The Red Violin (1998) in 2018-19, bringing the film with live orchestra to various festivals and the New York Philharmonic. Bell has also appeared three times as a guest star on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and made numerous appearances on the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle. Bell is also featured on six Live From Lincoln Center specials, as well as a PBS Great Performances episode, “Joshua Bell: West Side Story in Central Park.”
In 2021 Bell began a collaboration with the Trala violin learning app, and continues its active participation in the Education Through Music and Turnaround Arts program. And in 2014 he was featured on HBO in a documentary, Joshua Bell: A YoungArts Masterclass, teaching and performing alongside string players from the National Young Arts Foundation. For his commitment to arts education, he received the 2019 the Glashütte Original Music Festival Award at the Dresden Music Festival.
As a permanent partner of Emberstone, the leading virtual instrument sampling company, Bell was involved in the development of the “Joshua Bell Virtual Violin,” a sampler created for producers, engineers, artists, and composers considered the best virtual instrument of its kind. Bell also collaborated on the Joshua Bell VR experience with Sony PlayStation 4 VR, which features Bell performing with pianist Sam Haywood in full 360-degrees VR.
As an exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 albums, garnering GRAMMY®, Mercury®, Gramophone and OPUS KLASSIK awards. Bell’s 2019 Amazon Originals Chopin Nocturne arrangement was the first classical release of its kind on Amazon Music. His 2013 album with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields featuring Bell directing Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh symphonies, debuted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts.
In 2007, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post story, centered on Bell performing incognito in a Washington, D.C. metro station, sparked an ongoing conversation regarding artistic reception. The feature inspired Kathy Stinson’s 2013 children’s book, The Man With The Violin, and an animated film with music by Academy Award-winning composer Anne Dudley. Stinson’s subsequent 2017 book, Dance With The Violin, illustrated by Dušan Petričić, offers a glimpse into one of Bell’s competition experiences at age 12.
The great violinist performs on 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin, with a bow made by the famous French master François Xavier Tourte (1747-1835).