Joshua Bell

With a career spanning four and a half decades, Grammy Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell CBE is one of the most celebrated artists of our time. He has performed with virtually every major orchestra in the world, and regularly appears as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, conductor, and as the Music Director of London’s Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF). In 2025, he was awarded an honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by King Charles III for services to Music.

In the 2026-27 season, Bell leads two extensive international tours with ASMF, first coupling Dvořák’s Violin Concerto with Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony in Taipei, Macao, Beijing, Shanghai, and other destinations in China, then pairing concertante works by Bruch and Dvořák with symphonies by Mendelssohn and Brahms in London, Berlin, Hamburg, and other major European cities. In his second season as Principal Guest Conductor of the New Jersey Symphony, he plays and conducts all-Beethoven programs to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death. Other orchestral highlights include a return to the New York Philharmonic, where he conducts Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony and leads Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” from the violin, and concerto engagements with the Orchestre de Paris and the Boston, Atlanta, and Detroit Symphonies. Bell also embarks on a high-profile European recital tour with pianist Peter Dugan, performing programs of Bach, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and John Corigliano at London’s Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and beyond.

In 2011, Bell was named Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, succeeding Sir Neville Marriner, who founded the orchestra in 1959. Bell’s history with the Academy dates back to 1986, when he first recorded the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos with Marriner and the orchestra. Bell has since led the orchestra on several albums, including the 2019 Grammy-nominated Bruch: Scottish Fantasy. In April 2024, the Academy announced the extension of his contract through the 2027-28 season. Bell is also the Founder and Music Director of the Chamber Orchestra of America (COA), which aims to empower the next generation of artists through performance opportunities, mentorship, and educational outreach initiatives. In April 2025, COA made its debut at TED2025, where Bell gave a TED Talk about the power of live orchestras in today’s tech-filled world.

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. Bell gave the work’s premiere performances with Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, and Seattle Symphony.

A leading proponent of rediscovery, Bell played a major part in bringing to light the long-lost Violin Concerto by Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann. After partnering in 2024 with Ukrainian-born Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska to make the work’s Diapason d’Or-winning world premiere recording for Pentatone, last year he gave the concerto’s UK premiere at London’s BBC Proms, North American premiere with the New York Philharmonic, and Canadian premiere with the Toronto Symphony.

Bell’s many collaborators include Emanuel Ax, Chris Botti, Renée Fleming, Josh Groban, Lang Lang, Dave Matthews, Anoushka Shankar, Regina Spektor, Sting, Daniil Trifonov, and the late Chick Corea.

As an exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 albums, winning Grammy, Mercury, Gramophone, Diapason D’Or, and Opus Klassik awards. He is currently recording Fauré’s chamber music with Steven Isserlis and Jeremy Denk, who previously partnered with him on a 2024 Mendelssohn trios release that was a Gramophone “Editor’s Choice.” Bell’s 2019 Amazon Originals Chopin Nocturne arrangement was the first classical release of its kind on Amazon Music, and his 2013 album with ASMF, on which he conducts Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh symphonies, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts.

Bell worked with John Corigliano on the film soundtrack for The Red Violin (1998), which won the composer an Academy Award and made Bell a household name. Since then, he has appeared on several other soundtracks, including Ladies in Lavender (2004) and Defiance (2008). To commemorate the 20th anniversary of The Red Violin, he performed with live orchestra to screenings of the film at festivals and with the New York Philharmonic. He appeared three times as a guest star on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and made numerous appearances on the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle. Bell is also featured on six Live from Lincoln Center specials, as well as on a PBS Great Performancesepisode, “Joshua Bell: West Side Story in Central Park.” In 2020, PBS presented Joshua Bell: At Home with Music, a nationwide broadcast produced entirely in lockdown by Tony and Emmy Award-winning director Dori Berinstein. Sony Classical subsequently released the companion album: Joshua Bell: At Home with Music (Live).

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 has also partnered with Trala, the tech-powered violin learning app; is actively involved with Education Through Music and Turnaround Arts; and, in 2014, mentored and performed alongside National YoungArts Foundation string musicians in an HBO Family Documentary special, Joshua Bell: A YoungArts Masterclass.

Through an ongoing partnership with Embertone, the leading virtual instrument sampling company, Bell launched the Joshua Bell Virtual Violin. A sampler for producers, engineers, artists, and composers, this is widely considered the best virtual instrument of its kind. He also collaborated with Sony PlayStation 4 VR on the Joshua Bell VR experience, which features Bell and pianist Sam Haywood performing in full 360-degree VR.

In 2007, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post story, about Bell performing incognito in a Washington, D.C. metro station, sparked an ongoing conversation about artistic reception. This inspired Kathy Stinson’s 2013 children’s book, The Man with the Violin, and an animated film with music by Academy Award-winning composer Anne Dudley. Illustrated by Dušan Petričić, Stinson’s 2017 book, Dance with the Violin, offers a glimpse into one of Bell’s childhood competition experiences. Bell debuted the “Man with the Violin” festival at the Kennedy Center that same year, later presenting a “Man with the Violin” family concert with the Seattle Symphony.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell began playing the violin at the age of four and started studies with his mentor, Josef Gingold, eight years later. At 14, Bell debuted with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and at 17 he made his Carnegie Hall debut with the St. Louis Symphony. He signed with his first label, London Decca, at 18, when he also received the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Since then, Bell has been nominated for six Grammy Awards, 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 has also received the 2003 Indiana Governor’s Arts Award and, in 1991, a Distinguished Alumni Service Award from the Jacobs School of Music. In 2000, he was named an “Indiana Living Legend.” Bell has performed for three American presidents and the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. He participated in former president Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities’ first cultural mission to Cuba, subsequently joining Cuban and American musicians for an Emmy-nominated PBS Live from Lincoln Center special. Titled Joshua Bell: Seasons of Cuba, this celebrated the renewal of cultural diplomacy between Cuba and the United States.

Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin.