James Ehnes

Already a presence to be reckoned with by his early twenties, James Ehnes claims a place among the finest violinists of the day. Ehnes has a large and growing recording catalog, counting two Grammy Awards among his accolades. In 2024, he was heard on a recording of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto with Sir Andrew Davis, as well as one of John Williams' Violin Concerto with Stéphane Denève.Ehnes was born on January 27, 1976, into a musical family in Brandon, Manitoba. He was exposed to a variety of instruments as a child but found himself attracted to the violin. At age four, he began lessons with his father, a trumpet professor at Brandon University, and by nine, Ehnes came into the care of François Chaplin, a respected violin pedagogue on the faculty of Brandon University. Under Chaplin's tutelage, Ehnes won the 1987 grand prize in strings during the Canadian Music Competition; in 1988, he won first prize in strings at the Canadian Music Festival, becoming the youngest musician to have accomplished that feat. At the Meadowmount School summer program in upstate New York, Ehnes began studying with Sally Thomas, whose presence at the Juilliard School of Music in New York induced him to enroll there to continue his work with her. At Juilliard, Ehnes appreciated Thomas' nontraditional instructional methodology; with her, he was able to explore his own solutions to technical and interpretive problems. Ehnes signed a contract with Telarc Records in 1995. He made his recording debut that year on a disc featuring the Paganini Caprices. Arts manager Walter Homburger came out of retirement to guide Ehnes' career several years before his graduation from Juilliard with the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music in 1997. Ehnes works with many of the world's leading conductors and orchestras, and his success as a recitalist led him to chamber music collaborations with such artists as pianists Leif Ove Andsnes and Louis Lortie and cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Steven Doane. Among his other acclaimed recordings are a collection of Debussy, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns works (2000) with accompanist Wendy Chen and the Bruch Violin Concertos No. 1 and No. 3 (2011) with Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.In 2010, he founded the Ehnes Quartet, was inducted into the Order of Canada, and has also served as the director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. Ehnes has been one of the most visible violinists of the 2010s decade, appearing and recording often in Europe as well as North America. In each year of that decade, with one exception, he released multiple albums, and the year 2017 alone saw five of them. In all, Ehnes has won 11 Juno Awards and two Grammys (for Barber, Korngold, Walton: Violin Concertos, and James Newton Howard, Aaron Jay Kernis: Violin Concertos).In 2019, Ehnes released three albums, including a new recording of Beethoven's first three violin sonatas with pianist Andrew Armstrong, on Onyx. When concert halls were shuttered in the early 2020s, Ehnes produced a streaming series of "Recitals from Home" before returning to the recording studio and resuming his prolific pace. In 2024, he was backed on a recording of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto by Sir Andrew Davis leading the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and he also issued a recording of John Williams' Violin Concerto with Stéphane Denève leading the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
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