- Title: VARIOUS: VIOLINIST JOSHUA BELL.
- Date: 1st August 2002
- Summary: (REUTERS) SCU: SOUNDBITE (English) JOSHUA BELL SAYING: "Well I grew up in a musical family and my mother played the piano and my sisters and cousins and everyone played music so when I was four, three and four I used to collect rubber bands or elastic bands and string them on my dresser drawers, I would open the drawers to create different tensions, different pitches and
- Embargoed: 16th August 2002 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: VERBIER, SWITZERLAND & NEW YORK, USA
- Country: Switzerland
- Reuters ID: LVA4DSFJKHJL4C0FGJ8P7Z6848G6
- Story Text: Voted one of the 50 most beautiful people by People Magazine, American violinist Joshua Bell is one of the music scene's hottest talents. Equally at home with the works of Beethoven or Bernstein - as he demonstrated when he attracted a crowd of 100,000 to New York's Central Park for his West Side Story Suite last year - Bell is crossover at its best.
He was given his first violin at the tender age of four, following an experiment with rubber bands that led to his mother's suspicion that the boy should be given some more serious strings to play with.
Now Joshua Bell is the proud owner of an Antonia Stradivari violin dated from 1732. It is worth an estimated 3 million USD.
The 33-year old musician has made a name for himself that is quite unique in the classical music world. It could be something to do with his looks that led People Magazine to declare him one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world.
It started a relationship with the media that Bell has been keen to court; he has appeared on The Tonight Show, performed a duet with a tuba-playing Telly on Sesame Street and been featured in Vogue, Esquire and similar glamour titles. Unlike other classical artists, Bell realised that this is the route to success.
The founding director of Verbier Festival Martin Engstroem also holds another job as artistic director of Deutsche Grammophon. "It's called A and R - Artist and Repertoire - and the 'A' part is becoming increasingly more important meaning that the artist themselves are more important than the repetoire. So it is true that if you have, if the record company finds a personality and somebody who has something more to offer than just playing beautifully, that's the way we go down. So whereas a couple of years ago, ten, twenty years ago it was all about sound and beautiful performance, it has shifted nowadays to get the attention of the big crowd you have to offer something more than just a beautiful performance."
A beautiful face and a mission to get the lighter, easier classical music out there. It's something that his friend and fellow musician, French pianist Jean Yves-Thibaudet, shares.
Also famous for his style - at an appearance at London's Proms last week he sported a Vivienne Westwood midnight blue ruffle shirt for his rendition of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue - Yves-Thibaudet has also been brushed with the dreaded crossover brush.
Bell's West Side Story Suite recording was actually nominated for a Grammy in the category of Crossover.
"I mean the music of Bernstein and West Side Story is hard to categorise because it's, Bernstein was a great classical composer and the music is classical in so many ways but also it was a movie, it was a Broadway show, I think most Americans can hum the tunes from 'Maria' or 'Tonight' and so it was called crossover but for me it's just music, you know, I don't make these sorts of categories."
He needn't worry. Classical purists may look harshly on crossover artists but then they don't have the pleasure of performing to a crowd of 100,000 at New York's Central Park; the massive crowd came to hear Joshua Bell's interpretation of Leonard Bernstein's magical composition.
But while the Bernstein work and movie soundtracks (The Red Violin) continue, working at the old masters is Bell's core work, like the Brahms Quintet he performed at Verbier and the works by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Franck that he performed with Jean Yves-Thibaudet.
On August 21 Joshua Bell performs at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Proms season.
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