Fifteen year old Joshua Brown studies violin with Almita and Roland Vamos at the Music Institute of Chicago’s (MIC) Academy, a rigorous precollege training program for young musicians. Joshua is a Rachel Barton Pine scholarship winner (2014/15) and an Academy Laureate (2015/16).
This past summer, Joshua was awarded both Second Place and the Audience Award in the 2015 Cooper International Violin Competition in Ohio. He had the distinct honor of playing Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra, under the baton of Jahja Ling. “Had he played from behind a curtain, you wouldn’t have believed that Joshua Brown…was only 15,” wrote Daniel Hathaway for clevelandclassical.com. “His interpretation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s first violin concerto was so maturely wrought that it might have come from a seasoned professional. Brilliantly played and expertly paced, Brown’s performance checked into every emotional corner of [the] work … Brown was spellbinding throughout his entire time on stage.” Mark Satola in The Plain Dealer described Brown’s performance as “stunning” and “on an Olympian level…Brown played with such assurance that it was easy to forget he was a young teenager.”
Joshua has also won First Place in many competitions, including the MIC Young Artist Concerto Competition, the Luminarts Cultural Foundation’s High School Classical Music Competition, the Sejong Music Competition, the Asian American International Music Competition, the Alexander and Buono International String Competition, the Music Festival in Honor of Confucius Competition, the DePaul Concerto Festival for Young Performers, the Robert Stanger Young Artist Competition, and the Rockville Competition for Piano and Strings.
Joshua has performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Carnegie Hall in New York City, and Severence Hall in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to performing with the Cleveland Orchestra, he has also recently soloed with the Oistrach Symphony Orchestra, the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra, the Northbrook Symphony Orchestra, the New North Shore Chamber Orchestra, and the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra. Second performances with both the Northbrook Symphony Orchestra and the New North Shore Chamber Orchestra have also been scheduled for the coming year.
In addition to his solo work, Joshua enjoys performing chamber music. As part of the Fortis Piano Quartet, he was recently named the Grand Prize Winner in the A.N. & Pearl G. Barnett Chamber Music Competition, was a semifinalist in the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, and was featured on WFMT’s Introductions. Joshua also enjoys playing music with his brother and sister, and the three siblings have been featured playing their violins on both Fox News and WFMT’s Introductions (as part of Make Music Chicago’s live broadcast). Joshua has had the privilege of taking lessons and master classes with teachers such as Rachel Barton Pine, Ilya Kaler, Shirley Givens, Jonathan Carney, Jody Gatwood, Igor Yuzefovich, Kelly Hall-Tompkins, Lambert Orkis, Weit Hertenstein, Nurit Pacht, and Daniel Phillips.