Timothy Chooi: The Violinist Who Took The Professorship
In 2018 a violinist from Victoria, British Columbia won first prize at the International Joseph Joachim Violin Competition in Hanover — the first Canadian ever to do it — and, in the same year, became the first violinist and the first North American to receive the Verbier Festival's Prix Yves Paternot. Three years later, at twenty-seven, he did the thing rising soloists almost never do. He took a full-time academic job.
Victoria, By Way Of Indonesia
Chooi was born on 17 December 1993 in Victoria, British Columbia, into a family of Chinese descent that had emigrated from Indonesia. It was not a settled childhood. The family later moved to the United States, where his father worked in Florida; Chooi finished high school in Philadelphia, graduating with top honours.
He was not the only violinist in the house. His older brother is Nikki Chooi, who went on to serve as concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Two brothers from a small city on Canada's Pacific coast, both reaching the top of a profession with perhaps a few hundred serious international places in it, is a statistical oddity that no amount of talk about innate gifts fully explains.
Suzuki At Three
The training started at three, with the Suzuki method at the Victoria Conservatory of Music under Esther Tsang. What followed is one of the most thoroughly credentialled educations in contemporary violin playing. He took a Bachelor of Music at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Ida Kavafian and Pamela Frank; a Master of Music and an Artist Diploma at the Juilliard School with Catherine Cho; and a Professional Studies diploma at the Kronberg Academy in Germany with Christian Tetzlaff. He also studied privately with Pinchas Zukerman and Patinka Kopec.
Curtis, Juilliard, Kronberg, plus Zukerman: that is essentially the entire spine of American and German violin pedagogy, absorbed by one player over roughly fifteen years.
"The Miracle Violinist"
The public breakthrough came early and at scale. In 2007 he played at the Victoria Symphony's "Splash" celebration before an audience of more than fifty thousand people. In 2010 he entered Curtis, won the Grand Prize at the Montreal ManuLife Competition, and made his concerto debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra — after which the critic Claude Gingras called him "the miracle violinist."
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →Then came the long climb. He was named to the Canada Council for the Arts Musical Instrument Bank repeatedly, from 2010 onward. He won the Vadim Repin Scholarship Award in 2013, was a laureate of the International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in 2014, took the bronze medal at the Michael Hill International Violin Competition in New Zealand in 2015, and won Curtis's Milka Violin Award in 2017.
Hanover And Brussels
2018 was the year everything landed at once: first prize at the Schadt Violin Competition, the Prix Yves Paternot at Verbier, and first prize in Hanover at the Joachim. In 2019 he took second prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, the result that opened the major European engagements.
Also in 2018, and less visibly, he co-founded the VISION Collective, an ensemble built around community outreach with immigrant and refugee communities. Juilliard later awarded him its Robert Sherman Award for Music Education and Community Outreach. In 2022 the school gave him the Norman Benzaquen Career Advancement Grant and the Gershen Cohen Violin Award.
The Professor
In 2021 Chooi joined the University of Ottawa as Assistant Professor of Violin. He was twenty-seven — extraordinarily young for a tenure-track appointment, and extraordinarily early for a soloist with a Queen Elisabeth medal and a European touring career to accept the administrative gravity that comes with one.
The bet appears to have worked. In 2025 he was promoted to Associate Professor and appointed Head of Strings, and the university gave him its Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Research Award. Meanwhile the performing career did not stall: in 2026 he was appointed Artistic Partner of the Wiener Concert-Verein, a post *The Strad* reported that March.
The Instruments
He has had the use of violins that would be museum pieces in most countries. Since 2021 the Nippon Music Foundation has loaned him the 1714 "Dolphin" Stradivarius — an instrument previously played by Jascha Heifetz and by Ray Chen. Since 2023 he has also had the 1741 "Titan" Guarneri del Gesù, on loan from Canimex of Drummondville, Quebec. His University of Ottawa position supplies a 1761 Landolfi. His documented performances include Vivaldi's *The Four Seasons* and the Tchaikovsky and Dvořák repertoire.
Why Timothy Is Called a Genius
The word attached to him early, and in a specific form: Claude Gingras called the sixteen-year-old who debuted with the Montreal Symphony in 2010 "the miracle violinist." That is a critic's phrase about physical playing, not a claim about intellect, and the honest account keeps it there.
The skill is concrete. Winning the Joachim in Hanover and placing second at the Queen Elisabeth requires assembling several hours of memorised repertoire — concertos, sonatas, unaccompanied Bach, a commissioned work learned under quarantine conditions — and delivering all of it, at full technical and expressive commitment, over two or three weeks in front of juries listening specifically for what goes wrong. It is a test of intonation control, bow management, memory under duress and nervous system, and Chooi passed it at the highest available level, twice, in consecutive years.
There is a second argument, less often made, that comes closer to intellectual distinction: the decision to take an academic post at twenty-seven, build a teaching department, co-found an outreach ensemble for refugee communities and still be appointed an artistic partner in Vienna at thirty-two. That is a structural intelligence about what a musician's life can be, in a profession that generally offers one template.
The counter-case is that "miracle violinist" is a review, not a verdict, and it was written about a teenager. Chooi has no significant documented discography; his reputation rests on competitions and appointments rather than on recorded interpretations that can be argued over. His most prestigious result, the Queen Elisabeth, is a second place. And a violinist who spends significant time as Head of Strings at a Canadian university has made a trade — security and influence in exchange for the obsessive single-mindedness that produces the very greatest playing. It may be the wiser life. It is not the one that makes legends.
What He Is Building
The Chooi model is worth watching precisely because it is unfashionable. Instead of a career staked entirely on touring and recording, he has assembled four things that support each other: a professorship, a European artistic partnership, an outreach collective and the loan of two of the finest violins in existence. Whether that produces a body of interpretation to rival his brother's orchestral distinction or his own competition record is unresolved. What it has already produced is a demonstration, for a generation of conservatory students watching him, that the soloist's all-or-nothing gamble is not the only way to spend a life in music.
