Judith Ingolfsson is an Icelandic violinist and
teacher born (in Reykjavik, Iceland) on May 13, 1973. From her home base in Germany, she leads a
very busy international career and is well-known for being the Gold Medalist at
the 1998 Indianapolis International Violin Competition, now considered one of
the top three violin competitions in the world, on a par with the Queen
Elizabeth and Tchaikovsky violin competitions, though these last two have been
in existence far longer. In 1999, she was named Debut Artist of the Year by National Public Radio
(USA.) In 2000, she toured the U.S. as
soloist with the Iceland Symphony, culminating with highly acclaimed
performances in Carnegie Hall (New York) and the Kennedy Center in Washington
D.C. WQXR (New York) and Chamber Music
America gave her their Record Award for her debut CD in 2001. She has toured throughout the world,
appearing with almost every major orchestra, every major conductor, and in
every important venue. Her playing has
been described as being “rock solid, marvelously precise, and very
elegant.” Ingolfsson began her violin
studies at age 3 (same age as Jascha Heifetz when he began) and had performed
in public by age 5. Her first violin
teacher was Jon Sen, concertmaster of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. In 1980, her family immigrated to the
U.S. She was 7 years old. She made her orchestral debut in Germany at
age 8, playing Bach’s A minor concerto. At
the age of 14, she entered the Curtis Institute where her main teacher was the
famous violin pedagogue Jascha Brodsky (pupil of Lucien Capet, Eugene Ysaye,
and Efrem Zimbalist.) Prior to that, she
had a number of different teachers due to the fact that her family lived in
various States before settling in Philadelphia.
It is fascinating that Guila Bustabo (a concert violinist who had the dubious
distinction of having been arrested by General George C. Patton right after the end of World War Two) was one of her teachers. Carol Glenn and Josef Gingold were also among her teachers during that time. After graduation from Curtis, she studied
further at the Cleveland Institute of Music under David Cerone and Donald
Weilerstein. In addition to her concert
and recital engagements, Ingolfsson plays at a number of music festivals around
the world, including the well-known Barge Music series in New York, the Spoleto
Festival, Grand Teton Music Festival, Reykjavik Arts Festival, Juniper Music
Festival (Utah), and the Aigues-Vives en Musiques Festival in France -
Aigues-Vives is a small city in southern France, perhaps no more than 60 miles
from the Spanish border. Her chamber
music concerts have included performances with the Miami String Quartet, the
Vogler String Quartet, the Avalon String Quartet, and the Chamber Music Society
of Lincoln Center. Ingolfsson has
already appeared with over 100 different orchestras throughout the world, in
addition to numerous television and radio broadcasts for PBS, CBS, and NHK (in
Japan.) She was appointed to the faculty
of the University of Colorado (Boulder) in August of 2006 but soon moved to the
Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Stuttgart (State University of
Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart) in Germany in October of 2008. Her recital accompanist is usually (Russian
concert pianist and conductor) Vladimir Stoupel, with whom she formed a duo
(the Ingolfsson-Stoupel Duo) in 2006. Ingolfsson
has played the Gingold Stradivarius of 1683 (also known as the Martinelli
Strad), a 1750 Lorenzo Guadagnini, and a modern violin by French luthier Yair Hod Fainas, constructed for her in 2010.
I have heard the Gingold and the Guadagnini up close for hours and both
are great-sounding violins. The Fainas violin
I have not yet heard but I am willing to bet it has a gorgeous sound, as good a
sound as the best Stradivari violins. (I
admit I much prefer new violins to old.)
Ingolfsson has been recording commercially since 1999. Her abundantly-praised recording of the
Tchaikovsky concerto can be found here. You
can also find out why her recent recording of the Ysaye Solo Sonatas has been
so highly acclaimed here. A wonderful
YouTube video of Ingolfsson in performance can be seen (and heard) here. The photo is by Michael Rosenthal, taken
during a piano trio performance.
Josef Gingold was a Russian (Belarusian)
violinist, author, and teacher born on October, 28, 1909. He is mostly known for having been a highly
successful teacher, one of the artists who put the Indiana University School of
Music (Bloomington, Indiana) on the map.
Many have put him on the level of Ivan Galamian as an influential violin
pedagogue. He began his violin studies
as a child (perhaps at age 4) and gave his first public performance for a group
of German soldiers during World War I. He
was not yet 6 years old and had not yet learned to read music. In October of 1920, his family came to the
U.S. and he began his studies at the Music School Settlement in New York City.
Later on, from age 12, he studied privately with Vladimir Graffman (father of
pianist Gary Graffman), an assistant to the great pedagogue, Leopold Auer. Gingold then made his debut at Aeolian Hall
in 1926 when he was 17 years old – one source says 1930, which quite possibly
was a second debut. Between May, 1927
and September, 1929, he studied with Eugene Ysaye in Belgium. While there, he gave the premiere of Ysaye’s
Ballade – his third sonata for unaccompanied violin (Opus 27, No.3.) – on or
about February 28, 1928, at the Brussels Conservatory. Gingold also gave the first U.S. performance
of the same work. While in Europe,
Gingold concertized for at least a year (in Belgium, France, and Holland) but
returned to the U.S. in the fall of 1929.
He gave a recital in New York and performed as soloist with the
Minneapolis Symphony but things ended there.
Additional work was very hard to come by. Nevertheless, he played successfully, earning about $85 a week, as a free-lance
violinist – for Broadway shows, the Chicago World’s Fair, the Manhattan
Symphony, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and anywhere else he might find employment,
even if temporary - until he landed a position in the first violins of the NBC
Symphony in 1937. He played there for
seven seasons. In those years, several
string players who would later reach world-class status as soloists played
anywhere they could. Those players
included Eugene Ormandy, Pablo Casals, Mischa Elman, Leonard Rose, Joseph
Fuchs, Milton Katims, William Primrose, Oscar Shumsky, Israel Baker, Frank
Miller, Emanuel Vardi, and Elias Breeskin.
Gingold also joined the Primrose Quartet, playing second violin to Oscar
Shumsky. He later played first violin in
the NBC Quartet. In 1944, Gingold
accepted the position of concertmaster with the Detroit Symphony. He was 34 years old. Three years later, he began his tenure as
concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, where he remained for 13 years. While in Cleveland, Gingold taught at Case
Western Reserve University. In 1960, he
took up teaching full-time at Indiana University. He also taught master classes around the
world. It has been said that Gingold
emphasized individuality in his teaching, in the style of Leopold Auer. He edited many violin works and compiled a
3-volume set of orchestral excerpts which is highly valued by aspiring
orchestral violinists. You can hear one of Gingold's audio files on YouTube here. Among his
many pupils are Joseph Silverstein, Jaime Laredo, Philippe Graffin, Erez Ofer, Raymond
Kobler, Corey Cerovsek, Miriam Fried, Catherine Lange, Anne Akiko-Myers, Eugene Fodor, Arturo
Delmoni, Leonidas Kavakos, William Preucil, Philip Setzer, Shony Braun, and Joshua
Bell. Josef Gingold died on January 11,
1995, at age 85. His violin, which he
obtained in 1946, was the Martinelli Stradivarius of 1683. In 1998, Gingold’s son George (a lawyer) got
into a legal fight with a violin dealer over the commission he owed after the
dealer sold the violin (for $1.6 million.)
The fight was settled out of court.
Augustin Hadelich had this violin on loan from 2006 until 2010.
Joshua Bell (Joshua David Bell) is an American violinist born on December 9, 1967 (Perlman was 21 years old.) He is easily one of the most popular concert violinists currently on the scene. Bell began lessons at the age of four. Later on, he studied with Josef Gingold at Indiana University (Jacobs School of Music) from which he graduated in 1989. However, by 1985, he had already made his Carnegie Hall debut. Bell is best known for his soundtrack recording of the violin music on the 1998 film, The Red Violin. He is also known for having taken part in an experiment conducted by the Washington Post two or three years ago in which he played incognito at a D.C. metro station for which he collected about $40 from passersby. Bell has taught at the Royal Academy (London), MIT, and Indiana University. There is lots of information about him on the internet as well as videos on the YouTube and MySpace websites. He has also recorded most of the standard violin repertoire. He customarily wears informal attire for his concerts, as do Nigel Kennedy and Stefan Jackiw. He plays the 1713 Gibson Ex-Huberman Stradivarius, a notoriously famous violin, which, so far, has been stolen (and recovered) twice.
Eugène Ysaÿe was a Belgian violinist, composer, conductor, and teacher born on July 16, 1858 (Brahms was 25 years old.) His first lessons were with his father but later on, he was largely self-taught until about age 12. After he entered the Conservatory at Liege at age 7, he was dismissed because he made little progress. As a teenager, he became a pupil of both Henryk Wieniawski and Henri Vieuxtemps. Having graduated from the same conservatory he had previously been kicked out of, he became concertmaster of a highly accomplished orchestra which was about to become (in 1882) the Berlin Philharmonic – Benjamin Bilse’s Band. Many famous musicians frequented the beer hall where this orchestra played – among them were Joseph Joachim, Franz Lizst, Clara Schumann, and Anton Rubinstein. At age 27, Ysaye made his Paris debut and thus began a highly successful concert career. The following year, he was appointed violin professor at the Conservatory in Brussels, Belgium. Louis Persinger, Josef Gingold, Nathan Milstein, Alfred Dubois, Jascha Brodsky, Nikolai Sokoloff, and William Primrose were among his many students. In 1886, he founded the Ysaye String Quartet. Debussy, Saint Saenz, Chausson, and Franck were among composers who dedicated works to him. Ysaye was a busy concert artist. In fact, he turned down the conductor’s post at the New York Philharmonic when it was offered to him (1898) precisely because he was too busy. Understandably, Ysaye did not have too much time to compose though he wrote six sonatas for solo violin which are part of the standard repertoire, some chamber music, a few orchestral pieces, and an opera (Peter the Miner.) Carl Flesch, the Hungarian violin pedagogue was quoted as saying that Ysaye was the most outstanding and individual violinist that he had ever heard in his life. Ysaye was principal conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony for four years – 1918 to 1922 – and made a few recordings with that orchestra. It was during his tenure there that he met his second wife – he was 66 and she was 22 (Jeanette Dincin, a violinist.) Ysaye died in Brussels on May 12, 1931, at age 72.
Jaime Laredo is a Bolivian violinist, conductor, and teacher born on June 7, 1941 (Heifetz was 40 years old.) He began the study of the violin in Bolivia when he was five years old. Two years later, he came to the U.S. where he studied with Josef Gingold and Ivan Galamian among others. His orchestral debut came at age 11 with the San Francisco Symphony. His diploma is from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he studied with Ivan Galamian and George Szell. In 1958, he won the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium Competition – the youngest violinist to do so. In 1960, he debuted in Carnegie Hall. His Royal Albert Hall (London) debut followed close behind (1961.) He is known for being incredibly busy. Among other activities, he is the artistic advisor for the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, the conductor of the Vermont Symphony (since 1999), instructor of violin at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (since 1971), jury president for the Indianapolis International Violin Competition (since 1994), artistic director of the Brandenburg Ensemble, artistic director of the Chamber Music at the Y series (New York), professor of violin at Indiana University, violinist with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, recording artist (RCA, Columbia, Sony, Chandos, Vox, Arabesque, and Virgin Classics labels among others), recitalist, and concert violinist. Hilary Hahn and Pamela Frank are among his many pupils.
Corey Cerovsek is a Canadian violin prodigy born on April 24, 1972 (Heifetz was 71 years old.) In addition, he is a mathematician and accomplished pianist, having received advanced degrees in both music and math by age 16. Having already studied violin for a number of years, he began studying with Josef Gingold at Indiana University at age 12. He made his orchestral debut with the Calgary Philharmonic in 1981 and has been concertizing since age 16. Although an extraordinary performer and artist, he falls into that group of violinists who, for whatever reason, have not scaled the heights of public or critical recognition – Eugene Fodor, Phillipe Quint, and Vadim Gluzman come easily to mind.
