🇺🇸 Joshua Bell

Biography

In January 2007, a young man in jeans and a baseball cap set up at the entrance to the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, D.C., opened a violin case, and began to play. In 45 minutes, 1,097 people walked past. Seven stopped to listen for more than a minute. The man collected $32 in the case. The piece he was playing was Bach's Chaconne — one of the most demanding works in the violin repertoire. The violin was a 1713 Stradivarius worth $3.5 million. The man was Joshua Bell, three days removed from a sold-out performance at Boston's Symphony Hall where the cheapest tickets cost $100. The Washington Post had arranged the experiment to ask a question about beauty and context. What they discovered — that genius goes unrecognized when stripped of its setting — became one of the most widely discussed cultural stories of the decade.

Joshua Bell was born December 9, 1967, in Bloomington, Indiana, into a family with no professional musical background but with evident musical sensibility — his father was a psychologist, his mother a therapist, and both were devoted music listeners. At four, Bell began stretching rubber bands across drawer handles and plucking them to reproduce melodies he had heard. His parents recognized what they were seeing and enrolled him in violin lessons. By his early childhood, his progress was so extraordinary that the family sought out the most elite instruction available.

At twelve, Bell was accepted to study with Josef Gingold at Indiana University — a figure of legendary standing in American violin pedagogy, who had trained dozens of the country's leading string players. Bell was the youngest student Gingold had ever accepted. The two formed a bond that lasted until Gingold's death in 1995, and the older man's influence on Bell's musical thinking — the warmth of tone, the depth of interpretive engagement, the commitment to singing through the instrument rather than merely executing technical demands — is audible in every recording Bell has made.

At fourteen, Bell performed publicly with conductor Riccardo Muti — one of the leading conductors of his generation — a milestone that announced him to the professional classical music world as a talent to be watched immediately rather than in some indeterminate future. At seventeen, he made his formal debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Muti, playing the Violin Concerto by Mendelssohn. The performance was received as a major event, and his subsequent career has never faltered in the four decades since that Philadelphia debut.

Bell's repertoire is unusually broad for a soloist of his standing. He performs and records the standard violin concerto canon — Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Barber — with a warmth of tone and depth of interpretive commitment that places him in the first rank of contemporary violinists. But he has also engaged extensively with contemporary music, premiering works written specifically for him by composers including Nicholas Maw, whose Violin Concerto Bell premiered with the Cleveland Orchestra, and Edgar Meyer, with whom he has recorded collaborations that cross classical and Americana stylistic lines.

His film work has extended his reach significantly. He performed the violin solo on the soundtrack of the 1998 film The Red Violin, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. The recording introduced his sound to an audience of millions who might not otherwise have encountered classical violin performance. He has served as Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields — the celebrated British chamber orchestra founded by Sir Neville Marriner — since 2011, conducting and performing in a role that combines artistic leadership with solo performance in a manner unusual for a soloist of his stature.

He continues to perform more than 200 concerts per year, splitting his time between the concert stage, recording, chamber music collaborations, and his role with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. His 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Stradivarius — now valued at approximately $15 million — is one of the most celebrated instruments in the world, and his relationship with it over more than two decades has produced the kind of intimate, responsive sound that only emerges between a master and an irreplaceable instrument.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective