American violinist Joshua Bell has performed with virtually every major orchestra in the world, and he maintains engagements as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, conductor and the Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. A recipient of countless awards and commendations, Bell combines a virtuoso technique with sweetness of tone and highly musical phrasing. In recent years, Bell has been keen “to escape from the classical conventions” from time to time, and he has collaborated with John Williams, Edgar Meyer, and John Corigliano.
Joshua Bell Performs Corigliano’s The Red Violin (excerpt)
Growing up
Joshua Bell
Joshua Bell was born on 9 December 1967 in Bloomington, Indiana. His father Alan P. Bell was a psychologist and professor at Indiana University, and his mother Shirley Bell, a therapist. His father was of Scottish descent while his grandfather on his mother’s side was born in what was then Palestine in 1906. Bell grew up in musical family, but nobody was a professional musician. His mother was a an amateur pianist, and both his sister played the piano as well.
As Bell remembers, “somebody would be practicing all the time, and my mother playing the piano. At Christmas we had family musicales, with all the cousins and everybody played something.” Bell’s prodigious talent quickly became apparent as he started stretching rubber bands across the handles of his dresser, and thus explored the different pitches it created. In fact, he reproduced the music his mother was playing on the piano. His parents soon decided to get him a violin.
Max Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26 (Joshua Bell, violin; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Orchestra; Neville Marriner, cond.)
First Lessons
Joshua Bell as a child
Bell received a scaled-to-size violin when he was 5, and he took first lessons with Donna Bricht, widow of the composer Walter Bricht. Intensive lessons with Miriam Fried started shortly thereafter. A key figure in his early musical life, Fried guided him through the initial stages of violin study and provided him with a solid musical foundation. Bell recalled in an interview that “I am so happy my parents started me on the music, but they didn’t expect me to become a professional; they wanted me to be a kid and do a lot of sports.”
Bell became a competitive tennis player and participated in a national tennis tournament at the age of ten. He also loved bowling and basketball, and in his early teens, he became addicted to video games. However, he soon discovered his musical heroes at a summer camp called Meadowmount, a famous music camp in upstate New York.
Josef Gingold Masterclass Joshua Bell 1982
First Hero
Joshua Bell playing in the subway
The Meadowmount School of Music was founded in 1944 by Ivan Galamian, and during a 7-week period each summer, it prepares young instrumentalists for a professional musical career. Famous violin alumni included Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, and Bell attended at the age of 11. As he recalls, “it opened my eyes—that’s where someone first gave me a tape of Jascha Heifetz, the greatest violinist of the 20th century.”
Bell recalls that he listened to the tape after the lights went out, and it was “the first time I had a musical hero, and that I listen just for the sake of pleasure.” Once Bell enrolled at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music at the age of 14, he found another hero in his teacher, Josef Gingold. Actually, Bell had his first lessons with Gingold at Meadowmount, and once his parents assured him that they were not interested in pushing their son to be a star, Gingold accepted Bell as a student.
Pablo de Sarasate: Introduction and Tarantella, Op. 43 (Joshua Bell, violin; Simon Mulligan, piano)
Josef Gingold
Joshua Bell and Josef Gingold
When Bell began his studies with Gingold, his teacher had already gained a reputation for working with exceptional students. As Bell recalls, Gingold was a very strict and demanding teacher. However, “he was a very loving person and everybody who came into contact with him left with a smile. Some teachers get results by scaring their students into practising, but Gingold didn’t have that in him. You wanted to please him, so that got you to work. He was a very kind person, and he loved the violin so much that it never left his hand from morning to night, so you always felt inspired to go and practise.”
To be sure, Bell benefited immensely from Gingold’s vast experience, his mentorship, and his rigorous approach to violin technique and musical interpretation. Gingold always led by example; as Bell recalls, “Gingold would always play better than even these best students.
In the master classes, they would play, and they would sound good, and then he would get up, and you’d go, Ah, that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.”
For more of the best in classical music, sign up for our E-Newsletter
