Joshua Brown – 1st Prize 2016
Joshua Brown studies violin with Almita and Roland Vamos at the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy as the Alexandra C. and John D. Nichols Laureate Fellow. Joshua has won First Place in many competitions, including the MIC Young Artist Competition, the Luminarts Competition, the Sejong Music Competition, the Asian American International Music Competition, the Alexander and Buono International String Competition, the Confucius Competition, the DePaul Concerto Festival, the Robert Stanger Young Artist Competition, and the Rockville Competition for Piano and Strings. Joshua has also won scholarships from the American Opera Society of Chicago, the Highland Park Music Club, and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, was recently named a 2016 National YoungArts Winner, and was featured last month on NPR’s nationally syndicated program From the Top. Joshua has soloed with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Oistrach Symphony Orchestra, the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra, the Northbrook Symphony Orchestra, the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra, the New North Shore Orchestra, and the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra.
This past summer, Joshua was awarded both Second Place and the Audience Award in the 2015 Cooper International Violin Competition and had the honor of playing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of Jahja Ling. “Had he played from behind a curtain, you wouldn’t have believed that Joshua Brown…was only 15,” wrote Daniel Hathaway for
clevelandclassical.com . “His interpretation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s first violin concerto was so maturely wrought that it might have come from a seasoned professional. Brilliantly played and expertly paced, Brown’s performance checked into every emotional corner of [the] work … Brown was spellbinding throughout his entire time on stage.” Mark Satola in The Plain Dealer described Brown’s performance as “stunning” and “on an Olympian level…Brown played with such assurance that it was easy to forget he was a young teenager.”