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Joshua Bell
Violin
Joshua Bell This year, violinist Joshua Bell won his first Grammy® Award for his acclaimed recording of a new violin concerto written for him by English composer Nicholas Maw (SK 62856) - the kind of achievement that makes Bell the model of a modern virtuoso. At 33, he is a young man of his time whose artistry renews the legacy of classical music while reawakening its promise. Bell has been in the spotlight for almost 20 years, during which time he has seamlessly evolved from child prodigy to inspired and mature artist. “At the fiendishly difficult task of mastering the violin, Joshua Bell is that most mysterious of creatures - a natural,” wrote New York magazine. Bell’s new recording, Bernstein: West Side Story Suite (SK 89358), continues his exclusive relationship which began in 1996 with Sony Classical - a distinctive collaboration that has resulted in Grammy nominations for each of his crossover projects for the label, Short Trip Home (SK 60864), Gershwin Fantasy (SK 60659), The Red Violin (SK 63010), and Listen to the Storyteller (SK 60283), the Grammy Award for the Maw concerto and The Academy Award® for the score of The Red Violin, composed by John Corigliano, who proclaimed upon accepting the Oscar, "Joshua plays like a god!"

Bernstein: West Side Story Suite celebrates the music of American composer Leonard Bernstein. The recording premieres the new title work for violin and orchestra based on the hit-filled score of the classic musical West Side Story, as well as special arrangements of four memorable Bernstein tunes and Bell’s first recording of the composer’s Serenade. With orchestrator William D. Brohn, Bell was intimately involved in the development of the Suite, for which he wrote his own cadenzas. Bell was also reunited with composer Corigliano who arranged "Make Our Garden Grow" from Candide.

Bell’s performances and his magnetic presence have earned him popularity and acclaim that reach far beyond the concert hall. People magazine has named him one of the “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” and Glamour magazine chose him as one of six “It Men of the Millennium.” Bell has been featured on The Tonight Show, Charlie Rose, CNN, The CBS Evening News, PBS' Evening at Pops, CNBC, and a 1993 Live from Lincoln Center broadcast on PBS. He is one of the first classical musicians to be the focus of a music video, which has been broadcast on VH1, Arts & Entertainment and Bravo television networks. Bell was the subject of a March 1995 documentary film presented on BBC's Omnibus and recently broadcast on Bravo. He was also included in the program on Mozart from A&E's Biography series.

Joshua Bell Joshua Bell is an unabashed fan of Bernstein’s music and “like everybody else," grew up listening to West Side Story. “The tunes are incredible, so memorable and so beautiful, and they have really worked their way into the consciousness of most Americans, even into Gap ads,” he notes. “ Bernstein somehow managed to create a great musical, a score that is really on the level of the great works of classical music. It succeeds on every level, and so well that it seems almost wrong to classify it simply as a musical.” He points out that the new Suite is the kind of project that is called “crossover” today, but that it is actually a lively part of the tradition of classical music.

“Bernstein, as a composer, was a genius,” he continues, “and West Side Story is the best of both worlds, in a way - classical and pop. When I revisited this music and we made the arrangement, I realized how subtle, complex and inventive the score was, in technical ways. The music seems to transcend the time in which it was created, and that is, by definition, a great classic.”

The new recording, Bell adds, “gives me the chance to play music that I love. I think the Serenade is a major work. It’s deep, it’s fun, it’s everything about Bernstein on the highest level. It deserves to be up there with Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Bernstein did everything - he was the ultimate kind of musician - a great composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. To be able to write something like West Side Story and then be respected by the Vienna Philharmonic - he did a lot to help raise the profile of Americans in classical music.”

From his acclaimed collaboration with his friend, composer/bassist Edgar Meyer, on Short Trip Home, to being responsible for all the violin music for The Red Violin film and soundtrack recording on Sony Classical, to his collaboration with John Williams on Gershwin Fantasy, Bell has discovered new directions in his career through his partnership with Sony Classical.

He continues to bring his dynamic and thoughtful artistry to the mainstream classical repertoire, as in his award-winning Sony Classical recording of the violin concertos of Jean Sibelius and Karl Goldmark, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra (SK 65949).

Bell appeared on the 1999 Grammy Awards telecast, performing a selection from the Grammy-nominated Short Trip Home with Meyer, guitarist Mike Marshall and mandolinist Sam Bush. Also in 1999, Bell was featured as a soloist on the Grammy-winning Listen to the Storyteller: A Trio of Musical Tales from Around the World. In addition to his work for The Red Violin, Bell gave the 1998 world premiere performance of Corigliano's The Red Violin Chaconne, a concerto suite based on themes from the film's soundtrack, with the San Francisco Symphony and Boston Symphony Orchestras.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Joshua Bell received his first violin at age four. It was a 1/16th-size instrument his parents gave him after they discovered he had stretched rubber bands around the handles of his clothes chest, to pluck out melodies he heard his mother playing on the piano.

Growing up a typical American kid - with what he calls a “slight addiction” to computer games - he played basketball competitively and made the finals of a national tennis tournament when he was ten. Yet Bell was seriously committed to the violin by age twelve, when he met the renowned violinist and pedagogue Josef Gingold, who became his beloved teacher and mentor. As winner of the Seventeen Magazine/General Motors competition in 1981, he came to national attention at fourteen years of age. That year, Bell made his highly acclaimed orchestral debut with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and soon after debuted at Carnegie Hall, won an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and made his first recordings, creating a sensation that rapidly spread throughout the music world. Since that time, Bell has performed with the world's leading symphony orchestras, and with such conductors as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Herbert Blomstedt, Riccardo Chailly, Christoph von Dohnányi, Antal Dorati, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, John Eliot Gardiner, James Levine, Roger Norrington, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Yuri Temirkanov, Franz Welser-Möst and David Zinman.

A chamber music enthusiast, Bell initiated an annual series of chamber music concerts at London's Wigmore Hall in 1997. This year, by invitation of the Auditorium du Louvre, he will take the series to Paris. He currently enjoys regular chamber music collaborations with Pamela Frank, Steven Isserlis, Edgar Meyer, Olli Mustonen and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Bell is interested in exploring the work of living composers and has performed the world premieres of two works written for him: the Maw violin concerto and Air for violin and piano by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis.

Bell’s dream is to be a composer. Unique among his peers for composing his own cadenzas for the major violin concertos including Bernstein: West Side Story Suite, he has won praise from conductors and critics alike for his cadenzas for concertos by Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart. Bell is also passionately committed to instilling a love of music in children. In addition to master classes he teaches at London’s Royal Academy of Music, he serves as an Adjunct Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is part of the team developing new “high-tech musical instruments” that will streamline the process of learning and performing music.

Joshua Bell resides in New York City. He plays an Antonio Stradivarius violin dated 1713 known as the "Gibson ex Huberman."

Contact details and further information

Press Representative
Jane Covner
Tel:818.905.5511
E-mail jcovner@jagpr.com

Personal Assistant
Leah Morris
E-mail leah@joshuabell.com

Concert Management
IMG Artists/North America
Elizabeth Sobol
825 Seventh Avenue, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10019
Tel:212.489.8300
Fax:212.246.1596
E-mail artistsny@imgworld.com

For further details, see Joshua Bell's website

Visit Josh's recording label  Sony Classical for information on new releases.