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.
Jascha Brodsky was a Russian (Ukrainian) violinist
and teacher born (in Kharkof aka Kharkiv) on June 6, 1907. Although he began his career as a concert
violinist, he is primarily remembered as a great violin pedagogue, in the same
league as Peter Stolyarsky, Carl Flesch, Leopold Auer, Zakhar Bron, Ivan
Galamian, and Josef Gingold. Brodsky
shares a surname with another (not related) famous violinist: AdolphBrodsky. His first lessons (at age six) were
with his father. Such was also the case
with Jascha Heifetz and his father. He
also studied at the music conservatory of Tblisi (Georgia) and began
concertizing in Russia, appearing with several orchestras in Russia in his
early teens. He left for Paris in
1926. He was 19 years old. In Paris he studied with Lucien Capet and
later on, in Belgium, with Eugene Ysaye.
During that time, he played with Nathan Milstein and Vladimir
Horowitz. Milstein and Horowitz were
very close friends and had fled Russia at almost the same time in 1925. In 1930, with advice from Mischa Elman, Brodsky became a student of Efrem Zimbalist at the Curtis Institute (U.S.). In 1932, he began teaching at Curtis. By then, he had also become first violinist
of what became the Curtis String Quartet, with Benjamin Sharlip, Max Aronoff,
and Orlando Cole. The quartet was
invited to play at the White House at a later time. It was also the quartet for whom Samuel Barber wrote his string quartet - the one that includes the famous Adagio (Opus 11, completed in 1936.) The Curtis String Quartet did not, however, premiere the Barber quartet - Barber did not finish it in time. Barber's Opus 11 was premiered by the Pro Arte Quartet in late 1936 in Italy and was subsequently revised and re-premiered by the Budapest String Quartet in the U.S. in 1943. Brodsky retired from the quartet in 1981 and from
Curtis in 1996. He was 88 years old. An audio file of Schumann's Opus 41, number 1 (with Louis Berman on second violin) can be heard here in its entirety. He also taught (from
1942 onward) at the New School for Music (later – in 1986 - merging with Temple
University) in Philadelphia. His students include Jaime Laredo, Judith
Ingolfsson, Juliette Kang, Judy Barrett, Julie Kurtzman, Joey Corpus, Hilary
Hahn, Alan McChesney, Herbert Greenberg, Monica Bauchwitz, Ellen de Pasquale, Joseph
de Pasquale, Robert de Pasquale, Levon Zarasian, Martin Chalifour, Chin Kim,
Leila Josefowicz, and Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg.
For a short while, Brodsky played
– on loan from Curtis – the 1697 Molitor Stradivarius. Curtis acquired the Molitor in 1929 but got
rid of it in 1936. The Molitor has been
around a bit and is now owned by Anne Akiko Meyers - it had been previously played by Henri
Temianka and (more recently) Elmar Oliveira. For about
ten years, Brodsky also played a Stradivarius violin from 1694, also from the
Curtis Institute’s collection. The
violin had previously been owned by Karl Halir.
Curtis sold it in 1947. I don’t
know what violin Brodsky played after that. He died (in Ocala, Florida) on March 3, 1997, at age 89.
Lucien Capet (Lucien Louis Capet) was a French violinist, teacher, and composer born on January 8, 1873 (Brahms was 40 years old.) He is remembered for his book on bow technique, Superior Bowing Technique (1916), and for being the teacher of Ivan Galamian, Jascha Brodsky, Charles Munch, and Mario Dias de Figueiredo. In fact, thanks to Capet, Galamian emphasized bow technique over most everything else. I do not know who his teachers were when he was a child but he later studied at the Paris Conservatory where he was a pupil of someone named Morin (J.P. Maurin.) He appeared as soloist with many French orchestras, but especially the Lamoureux Orchestra, of which he was concertmaster from 1896 to 1899. Capet had been supporting himself by playing in dance halls and cafes since he was fifteen years old. From 1899 to 1903, he taught at the Society of Saint Cecilia School. It has been said that he studied the Brahms concerto for seven years before playing it in public. With Henri Casadesus on viola and Marcel Casadesus on cello (uncles of pianist Robert Casadesus) he formed the Capet Quartet in 1893. In 1924, Capet and fellow violinist Suzanne Chaigneau founded the Modern Violin Institute. Between 1925 and 1930, after several changes in personnel, the Capet Quartet recorded at least 12 quartets – 5 of them by Beethoven and the others by Mozart, Haydn, Ravel, Debussy, Schumann, Franck, and Schubert. Josef Gingold heard the quartet perform in Brussels in 1928 and many years later said that it was the greatest string quartet concert he had ever heard. It was an all-Beethoven program. There is an audio file on YouTube of the Capet Quartet playing Mozart. Capet also wrote three string quartets which are now completely forgotten. He died on December 18, 1928, at age 55.
Hilary Hahn is an American violinist and writer born on November 27, 1979 (Perlman was 33 years old.) She began violin lessons at age four. One of her first teachers was Klara Berkovitch (Baltimore), with whom she studied for five years (1984-1989.) At age ten, Hahn entered the Curtis Institute of Music where she studied with Jascha Brodsky for seven years, learning most of the standard violin repertory - the same 30 concertos that everyone else plays. Hahn also later studied with Jaime Laredo and Felix Galimir, among others. She began concertizing in 1991 (at age 12) but did not make her Carnegie Hall debut until 1996, by then already an established artist. Her graduation from Curtis came in 1999 though her bachelor of music degree belies the fact that she is one of the best (and most expensive) violinists on the world's classical music scene. Hahn's technique is characterized by extreme precision and an even, clear, lean tone. Her sound has few distinguishing features - it is very similar to that produced by a dozen other great violinists on the current concert stage. Her interpretations are subtle, well-defined, controlled, and cautious, not given to an abundance of emotion or idiosyncrasy. Her approach is similar to Anna-Sophie Mutter's in that there is a decided lack of bravado or go-for-broke risk-taking - the opposite approach as takes Leila Josefowicz or Arabella Steinbacher or Ivry Gitlis. Hahn reminds me of a quote from E.N. Bilbie's book: She has "little to say and so much to say it with." Her discography is already extensive and is easily accessible on the internet. In addition to having her own website (where she posts journal entries on a regular basis), she has a profile page on MySpace. One can also see and hear videos of her playing on YouTube. Unfortunately, not all of those videos are professionally produced.
Leila Josefowicz (Leila Bronia Josefowicz) is a Canadian violinist born on October 20, 1977 (Heifetz was 76 years old.) She is an intense genius who is sometimes not well-understood. She also plays the violin stupendously well. She has been criticized for her physicality while playing but you will not likely find someone performing with greater conviction, precision, and audacity. She began violin lessons at age three. By age 8, she was studying with Robert Lipsett in Los Angeles. She entered the Curtis Institute of Music (Philadelphia) at age 13 where she studied with Jaime Laredo, Joseph Gingold, Jascha Brodsky, and Felix Galimir, among others. By this time, she was already concertizing. She graduated from Curtis in 1997. There is an impressive video of her (on YouTube) playing Paganini with the Boston Pops (conducted by John Williams) at a very young age. Her Carnegie Hall debut was in 1994. Her discography - even this early in her career - is fairly extensive. Josefowicz was the recipient of a no-strings-attached MacArthur grant in 2008. (Jazz violinist Regina Carter received one in 2006.) She has played a 1739 and a 1724 Guarnerius.
