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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

JOSHUA BELL AT HOME

I got a rare opportunity to talk with violinist Joshua Bell at his home in Chelsea. The artist’s three story home
is totally designed by him. It is exquisite; in fact, Architectural Digest is featuring his home in the magazine.
He also designed a large space where as many as 200 friends can enjoy an evening of music much like the
salons of Paris.

Joshua showed us his fabulous wall of musical heroes and how talked about how they have been part of his
life studying music from a young age with his teacher Joseph Gingold. He even gives us the back story of
his body double role of the violinist in The Red Violin.

He has a new album appropriately title “AT HOME WITH FRIENDS”, which breaks away from the standard
classical repertoire pairing him with musicians from Sting to Chris Botti. Better will be airing an in depth story
Tuesday, September 29th. Make sure to check your listing for your city also check out Bettertv.com and The
Better TV channel on YouTube.

Rebecca Millman
Senior Producer

Posted on September 22, 2009 under Entertainment

The well-bred violin; Joshua Bell; Artist’s openness to
music expands classical boundary
Thursday, September 24th, 2009 | 5:50 am

Canwest News Service

There are very few true superstar musicians in the world of classic music. It is a genre,
aficionados and practitioners will be quick to tell you, that is often spurned in favour of
the easy gratification offered by pop, rock, hip hop and the like.

So where does Joshua Bell fit into this seemingly bleak picture? Well, at 13 years of age
Bell was already studying music at Indiana University, and by 14 the young classical
violinist made his orchestral debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. At 18, Bell created
his first studio recording, and in 2004 he performed all the songs on the Oscar-winning
score to the film The Red Violin. He was the first musician to have a classical music
video played on VH1, and was also the subject of a social experiment conducted by The
Washington Post that eventually became a Pulitzer Prizewinning article (see sidebar).

Today, at 41 years of age, this classically handsome musician is as much a superstar as

any violinist is likely to become, and tonight he joins Toronto Symphony Orchestra
music director Peter Oundjian to kick off a new season at the TSO.

"I almost feel like an honorary Canadian," Bell says of the city he visited annually during
his youth. Bell has also known Oundjian for more than 25 years; they met randomly in
the home of a violin collector while both men were passing through Los Angeles.
Tonight they’ll take the stage to play Brahms’ epic Violin Concerto, a piece Bell says is
"so rich and so deep — and it sounds cliche because everyone says it — that each time
you visit it, it just speaks to you."

It is his incredible gift with such classic concertos that has brought Bell’s name to the
very top of classical music, but it is his willingness to play and experiment with other
genres that have spread his fame beyond the traditional classical music audience.

"Over the course of my life I’ve come across some incredibly interesting musicians who
wouldn’t fall directly in the classical category," Bell says. "I like to have these evenings
at my home where anyone can mix and whoever wants to get up and play can do that."

These soirees in his Manhattan apartment, along with Bell’s openness to the sounds and
methods of other musicians, have led to the new recording Joshua Bell at Home with
Friends. The album, to be released on Tuesday, features collaborations with well-known
artists from across the musical spectrum including Sting, Josh Groban, jazz trumpeter
Chris Botti, sitar player Anoushka Shankar and Broadway singer Kristin Chenoweth,
among others.
It becomes apparent as he describes the manner in which he met each musician that Bell,
considered by many to be the world’s most gifted violinist, is likely to come into contact
with other talented musicians quite naturally. The fact that Bell has capitalized creatively
on these friendships is a testament to his willingness to learn from others. "I guess I’ve
been open," Bell says.

And while he hates the word crossover, Bell also admits that the consumption of music is
shifting so that collaborations like those on his new album are increasingly likely to
occur. "We live in an age today where you can have a million different things on a single
iPod," Bell says. "A lot of young people will have rock music and pieces of Beethoven
together on their iPod, and I think that’s great."

Bell witnessed effects of this sort of collaboration first hand after playing on a single
track on a Josh Groban album. "The album sold something like five or six million copies,
and I suddenly had all kinds of people coming to my concerts saying, ‘I heard you on
Josh Groban’s album and I’ve never been to a classical concert in my life,’ " Bell says.
"A lot of people just don’t know where to begin with classical music — they need some
way in — and projects like this new album can be that entryway."

-Joshua Bell plays with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra tonight and on Saturday at 8 p.
m. Call 416-598-3375 for tickets. Joshua Bell at Home with Friends will be released on
Tuesday.

———

WORTH LISTENING TO?

Being recognized by your musical peers is one thing, but would the average pedestrian
take notice of one of the world’s most gifted violinists? That was the experiment initiated
by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten when he asked Joshua Bell to busk at a
subway station during morning rush hour on Jan. 12, 2007, in Washington, D. C. Of the
1,097 people who passed Bell during his 43-minute performance consisting of six
classical pieces, only seven stopped to listen and 27 donated money. Weingarten’s
resulting article "Pearls Before Breakfast" won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
Bell’s busking efforts gained him $32.17 in change. National Post
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Joshua Bell has a signed photograph of violinist-composer Eugene Ysaye from

1907 on a wall of his apartment in Manhattan's Gramercy Park neighborhood,
the photo framed alongside an autographed sheet of paper. At the head of the
autograph, Ysaye inscribes a quote from his "Caprice after Saint-Saens' Etude
en Forme de Valse, No.6, Op. 52," a piece that Bell recorded on a 1992 Decca
album titled Poeme. Translated from French, the dedication below reads: "Cecile
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January 15, 1906."

At Home With Friends

Joshua Bell, violin
Sony
[available Sept 29]

Although violinist Joshua Bell is a Hollywood-vetted

crossover star - with his new album featuring the likes
of Sting and Josh Groban - he has the training and
taste of an old-school virtuoso, with ties to Golden Age
performers running deep.
One of the forty-one-year-old Indiana legendary;' Bell says. "Gingold studied with marks;' Bell says, "not necessarily pyrotechnics"
native's heroes is Belgian violinist-composer him as a boy. He would talk about Ysaye, But in recent Bell recitals that also
Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931), a forefather of imitate the way he played and encourage me included sonatas by Brahms, Franck and
modern violin technique who had pieces to learn his music. I have an autographed Janacek, Ysayes solo Sonata No.2 in A minor
dedicated to him by such contemporaries as picture of Ysaye hanging in my apartment was the most technically difficult piece on the
Chausson, Debussy and Cesar Franck. . that my former girlfriend gave me, and I have program, exploring "the violin in amazing
Ysaye was the teacher of Bell's teacher, the a ceramic replica of his hand that Gingold ways;' says Bell. "The piece is called the
Russian-born Josef Gingold, concertmaster of gave me just before he died, in 1995:' 'Obsession; which refers to Ysaves obsession
the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell Ysaye himself learned from Henri Vieux- with Bach. He wrote a set of six works for solo
and one of the great violin pedagogues. Gingold temps at the start of a Franco-Belgian school of violin just as Bach did, and Ysaye quotes from
instilled in Bell a reverence for Ysaye as history's violin playing that would be made famous on Bach's Partita NO.3 in the second solo sonata.
greatest violinist -composer after Paganini. - record by Arthur Grumiaux. Gingold stressed I joke that if Bach's solo works are the Old
"We only have recordings of Ysaye when the expressivity and nuance of Ysayes playing, Testament of the violin, then Ysave's are the
he was very old, but his technique was with "subtlety and beauty of sound its hall- New Testament" _

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Joshua Bell Puts New Spin on House-Concert Concept
Joshua Bell is admittedly blessed. On a good night, the violinist—who can fill a concert
hall—can pack nearly 200 people into a performance space on the second floor of his
newly renovated loft apartment in New York City for a private evening concert.

“My dream was to have sort of musical soiree evenings in this old-fashion salon-type
sense,” Bell says, “and invite different kinds of artists and various friends of mine and
have an eclectic mix of people playing in my home and invite guests or do it for charity.

“I’m spoiled—I’m very lucky to live in Manhattan this way. I designed the house myself
with an architect and really built every corner of it. It’s been a passion of mine for the last
four years.”

In part a reflection and celebration of Bell’s favorite corner of the stylish bachelor pad,
the album Joshua Bell: At Home with Friends is set for an October release by Sony
Classical. Listeners should get a taste of the many surprises one of these evenings at
Bell’s abode might hold, as the virtuoso is joined by jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, sitar
player Anoushka Shankar (daughter of the legendary Ravi Shankar), pianists Marvin
Hamlisch and Jeremy Denk, and even a cameo by Sting, among others. Bell’s Indiana
University school chum, the innovative contemporary bassist Edgar Meyer, also is
featured on the album. Meyer and mandolin player Chris Thile contribute a track that
bore the tentative title “Dotted Quarter = 105.”
“It’s one of the most challenging rhythmical things I’ve ever done,” Bell says, “and it
sounds simple, but you almost need a calculus degree to figure it out.”

Also look forward to an arrangement of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” by Bell and his
rock-crooning pal Frankie Moreno.