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Stories   >   ABC Classic - Legends presents: violinist James Ehnes

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ABC Classic - Legends presents: violinist James Ehnes

Posted: February 27, 2025

ABC Classic's Mairi Nicolson writes…..Twice Grammy Award-winning Canadian American violinist and violist James Ehnes has been visiting Australia for many years, building memorable relationships with our orchestras as a soloist and chamber musician. He's very much "a musician's musician," as they say.

The good news is, he's back! This month he embarked on a major Australasian tour beginning with concerts in New Zealand and he'll make landfall in Hobart on March 1 for the first of his fourteen concerts here. On March 22, he'll wind up in Melbourne for five concerts as the current Artist in Residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He had a particularly close relationship with the orchestra during the tenure of late chief conductor Sir Andrew Davis, with whom he recorded a number of commercial recordings.

In addition to playing concertos by Samuel Barber, Brahms and Mozart around Australia, James will lead the MSO in the evergreen Four Seasons by Vivaldi in an innovative program titled Birdsong, Thunderstorms and Fireworks, which also explores the First Nations perspective on the passing of the year curated by Noongar man Aaron Wyatt.

You won't be surprised to learn that in 2010 James founded the Ehnes Quartet and has also served as the director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. Whilst in Melbourne, he’ll also lead an unmissable Masterclass with musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music.

"The Jasha Heifetz of our day"

Canadians have a reputation for being modest and James is not your attention-grabbing celebrity. His stage persona is friendly but business-like, so that it's almost a shock when his bow hits the strings, emitting a golden tone backed up by an infallible technique.

"It's interesting. My dad was an amazing musician whom I had the utmost admiration for, but not a violinist."

James' father was a fine professional trumpeter and professor at the School of Music at Brandon University; his mum, a professional ballerina who ran a ballet school. "I think sometimes if you get too caught up in your own instrument it just becomes about that. You’re not really a musician, you’re a violin player. My exposure to all sorts of instruments through my dad’s orchestral world gave me a nice perspective."

That's a typical understatement from a man hailed as "the Jasha Heifetz of our day." Not yet fifty, Ehnes has garnered two Grammys, three Gramophone awards and 12 Juno awards.

While still a student he made his recording debut aged twenty with a much lauded album for Telarc of Paganini's Caprices.

His wide-ranging discography to date includes all the violin and viola staples but neglected composers too, like Hummel, Dohnányi and Dallapiccola.

He's not shy of finger-breaking new music either. In 2019 he was multi-tasking, pushing his shopping trolley round the supermarket in Florida, and checking out the live-stream of the 2019 Grammy Awards presentation from Los Angeles.

It must have been a surreal moment when they announced he'd won Best Classical Instrumental Solo for his recording of Jay Aaron Kernis' new Violin concerto. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer also won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

"James is a truly spectacular musician and collaborator, as well as a great human being," Said Kernis. "He took everything I threw at him with great good humour and generosity, and made the knuckle-dusting passages and everything else I gave him sound absolutely dazzling."

Then during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, James cleared out his living room at home in Florida, installed state of the art recording equipment to produce two gold recordings of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas and Ysaÿe solo sonatas. I'm not sure how the family adapted, but he recorded the albums in the dead of night to get the silence he needed.

A man in a blue shirt sits on a red velvet lounge holding a violin.
Violinist James Ehnes.(Supplied: Benjamin Ealovega.)
"…I think it was seeing Itzhak Perlman playing on Sesame Street."

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