Czech Chamber Music Society • Bell, Isserlis, Kissin

With a career spanning four decades, Grammy Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell is one of the most celebrated artists of our time. He has performed with every major orchestra in the world, and regularly appears as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, director and conductor. In 2011, Bell succeeded founder Sir Neville Marriner as Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. He is also the Founder and Music Director of Chamber Orchestra of America (COA), which aims to empower the next generation of artists.

As an exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 albums, winning Grammy, Mercury, Gramophone, Diapason d’Or, and Opus Klassik awards. Following his world premiere recording of Thomas de Hartmann’s Violin Concerto, Bell gives the concerto’s UK, North American, and Canadian premieres at London’s BBC Proms, with the New York Philharmonic, and during his season-long tenure as a Toronto Symphony Spotlight Artist. He also leads extensive U.S. and European tours with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and makes his first appearances as the New Jersey Symphony’s inaugural Principal Guest Conductor.

Bell has commissioned and premiered new works by John Corigliano, Edgar Meyer, Behzad Ranjbaran, and Nicholas Maw, winning a Grammy Award for his recording of Maw’s Violin Concerto. In 2023-24, he introduced his newly commissioned concerto project, The Elements, a five-movement suite by renowned living composers Jake Heggie, Jennifer Higdon, Edgar Meyer, Jessie Montgomery, and Kevin Puts.

A keen advocate for accessible music education, Bell received the 2022 Paez Medal of Art from the Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts, and the 2019 Glashütte Original Music Festival Award, presented in association with the Dresden Music Festival. He is actively involved with Education Through Music and Turnaround Arts and has partnered with Trala, the tech-powered violin learning app. The Joshua Bell Virtual Violin, created through an ongoing partnership with leading virtual instrument sampling company Embertone, is widely considered the best virtual instrument of its kind.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell has been named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America, selected as a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, and recognized with the Avery Fisher Prize. He received the 2003 Indiana Governor’s Arts Award and, in 2000, was honored as an “Indiana Living Legend.” 

Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin.

Evgeny Kissin’s musicality, the depth and poetry of his interpretations, and his extraordinary virtuosity have won him respect and admiration, which he deserves as one of the most talented classical pianists of his generation. He is in demand internationally, and he has appeared as a soloist with the world’s top orchestras under the baton of such famed conductors as Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, and Seiji Ozawa.

Evgeny Kissin was born to a Russian Jewish family in Moscow, and he began playing piano and improvising at the age of two. At six years of age, he began studying at a Moscow school of music for talented children named after its founders, the Gnessin sisters. It was there that Anna Pavlovna Kantor became his only teacher. At age ten he appeared with an orchestra for the first time, and a year later he gave a solo recital. As a 12-year-old boy, he won international fame when a recording of his appearance with the Moscow State Philharmonic was issued on LP. That recording’s tremendous success led to the release of five more live recordings of Kissin’s performances over the next two years. Evgeny Kissin first appeared abroad in 1985, and over the following years he gave many tours and concerts all around the world. December 1988 saw the worldwide broadcast of Kissin’s appearance at the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert under the baton of Herbert von Karajan.

Evgeny Kissin’s career has earned him many musical honours around the world. In 1991, for example, he was a special guest at the Grammy Awards Ceremony. Three years later, he became the youngest person honoured as the Instrumentalist of the Year by the magazine Musical America. He has received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the Manhattan School of Music, the Shostakovich Award (one of Russia’s highest honours for musicians), an honorary membership of London’s Royal Academy of Music, and most recently the title of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Hong Kong.

He is a citizen of the United Kingdom and of Israel as well as of Russia. He has been living in Prague since 2017. His is a vocal critic of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.