On Saturday’s broadcast, we feature 15-year-old violinist Isabella Brown of Gurnee, Illinois. Isabella is in her third year at the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy, a training center for advanced pre-college musicians. She studies violin with Almita and Roland Vamos as the Rachel Barton Pine Scholar and plays on a Dom Nicolo Marchioni detto ‘Amati’ of Bologna circa 1740, generously on loan to her from Kenneth Warren and Son, Ltd.
She has received first place in numerous competitions, including the Alexander and Buono International String Competition, the Asian American International Music Competition, the Rockville Competition for Piano and Strings, the Chinese Fine Arts Society Music Festival in Honor of Confucius Competition, and the Sejong Music Competition. She also won the Open Junior String Division of the 20th Annual MYA Walgreens National Concerto Competition as well as the 13th Annual DePaul Concerto Festival for Young Performers. She also received an honorable mention in the 2017 Chicago Symphony Orchestra Young Artist Competition.
Isabella made her solo debut with an orchestra at the age of ten when she performed with the Capital Symphonic Youth Orchestra on the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater stage. She has also played with the Oistrakh Symphony Orchestra, the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra, the New North Shore Symphony Orchestra, and the Northbrook Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, she was featured in the Alden Theater Young Soloist Series and has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., as well as in many venues throughout Virginia, Maryland, and Illinois, including Chicago’s Harris Theater, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Bennett Gordon Hall.
In addition to performing solo music, Isabella enjoys playing chamber music in the Academy’s chamber music program as part of the Corrente Piano Trio. She also enjoys playing music with her two older brothers, Nicholas and Joshua, and the three siblings were featured playing their violins in two segments on Fox News. They also performed together on WFMT’s Introductions as part of Make Music Chicago’s live broadcast and at the Lake Forest Symphony’s Music in the Garden Gala.
