With a career spanning almost four decades, GRAMMY Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell is one of the most celebrated artists of his era. Bell has performed with virtually every major orchestra in the world, and continues to maintain engagements as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, conductor, and as the Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

Bell’s highlights for the 2024-25 season include the release of two new albums in August: Thomas De Hartmann Rediscovered, featuring the world premiere recording of Ukrainian composer Thomas De Hartmann’s Violin Concerto on Pentatone, as well as an album of Mendelssohn piano trios, recorded with longtime friends and collaborators Jeremy Denk and Steven Isserlis on Sony Masterworks. Bell will rejoin Denk and Isserlis in November for a series of concerts at Wigmore Hall, on a program featuring Fauré chamber music (which they will record together later this season for a future album release). An avid recitalist, Bell tours internationally to South America, Australia, and mainland China, and performs his beloved “Voice and the Violin” program with soprano Larisa Martínez throughout North America. As a guest soloist, Bell will appear with the New York Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He will both conduct and play with the DSO Berlin, as well as in his role as Music Director of the Academy of St Martin of the Fields.

Bell was named Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in 2011, succeeding Sir Neville Marriner, who formed the orchestra in 1959. Bell’s history with the Academy dates to 1986, when he first recorded the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos with Marriner and the orchestra. In April 2024, the Academy announced the extension of Bell’s Music Director contract through the 2027-28 season.

As an exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 albums, garnering GRAMMY, Mercury, Gramophone, and OPUS KLASSIK awards.

Bell has commissioned and premiered new works by John Corigliano, Edgar Meyer, Behzad Ranjbaran, and Nicholas Maw, and his recording of Maw’s Violin Concerto received a GRAMMY Award. In 2023-24, Bell introduced his newly commissioned concerto project, The Elements, a suite featuring movements by five renowned living composers: Jake Heggie, Jennifer Higdon, Edgar Meyer, Jessie Montgomery, and Kevin Puts. The work received its premiere performances with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Hong Kong Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Bell has collaborated with peers including Renée Fleming, Daniil Trifonov, Emanuel Ax, Lang Lang, Chick Corea, Regina Spektor, Chris Botti, Anoushka Shankar, Dave Matthews, Josh Groban, and Sting, among others. He has performed for three American presidents and the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 2016, Bell participated in former president Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities’ first cultural mission to Cuba, joining Cuban and American musicians on an Emmy-nominated PBS Live from Lincoln Center special, Joshua Bell: Seasons of Cuba, celebrating renewed cultural diplomacy between Cuba and the United States.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell began playing the violin at age four, and at age 12, began studies with his mentor, Josef Gingold. At age 14, Bell debuted with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 17 with the St. Louis Symphony. At age 18, Bell signed with his first label, London Decca, and received the Avery Fisher Career Grant. In the years following, Bell has been nominated for six GRAMMY Awards, named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by Musical America, deemed a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, and received the Avery Fisher Prize. He has also received the 2003 Indiana Governor’s Arts Award and a Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 1991 from the Jacobs School of Music. In 2000, he was named an “Indiana Living Legend.”

Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin.

Daron Hagen occupies a unique position in American music as both a concert music composer and as the auteur composer-director of internationally-laurelled feature-length “operafilms,” that combine his own music and screenplays, placing him on the vanguard of a new genre described by OperaWire as “a neo-Gesamtkunstwerk form of opera cinema where each and everything seen on the screen, from the cuts to the lighting to the pacing, reflect the internal motivations of the story.”

Since 1983 he has created 14 operas, 3 operafilms, 6 symphonies, 14 concertos, over 50 chamber and choral works, and 500 art songs. Commissions have come from the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Seattle Opera, and a dozen other orchestras. He has written concertos/roles for Gary Graffman, Jeffrey Khaner, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Sharon Robinson, Paul Sperry, and Marni Nixon. His “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019.

A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo, Hagen is a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowships, the Bogliasco Fellowship, the ASCAP-Nissim Prize, and two American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, among others. He has taught at Bard College, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, City College of New York, the Curtis Institute of Music, New York University, and the Princeton Atelier.

Hagen’s music is widely recorded on labels from Naxos to Sony and published by Peermusic Classical. He is represented by Encompass Arts. A graduate of Curtis and of the Juilliard School, he is married to composer-singer Gilda Lyons and has two sons, Atticus and Seamus.

Commissioned to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and JoAnn Falletta’s 25th year as music director, with the generous support of Scott Bieler, City of Light is a tone poem inspired by the thrum of electric energy and the thrill of illumination, whether it be the hydroelectricity generated by Niagara Falls to power the lights and industry of one “City of Light,” Buffalo, or the crackling synapses of an Einstein’s mind — the surging intellectual and philosophical power of secular humanist insights first ginned up in another “Ville-Lumière,” Enlightenment-era Paris, or the spiritual illumination suffusing the Sufi mystic Rumi the light that makes the shadows plain in Plato’s cave or the lightning that struck the key hanging from Benjamin Franklin’s kite — the spiritual essence of animism or the energy that powers the execution of the code sending ones and zeros back to us from the Voyager spacecraft — or the “subtle electric fire” that inspires our hearts to beat.