IU grad winning awards, fans with violin

Mimi Zweig knows that some great musicians are born and not made.\nViolinist and IU graduate Joshua Bell is one of these.\n"His music making is something that comes from within him, and I doubt this can be taught ... just nurtured," Zweig said.\nZweig, a professor of violin at the IU School of Music, nurtured the world-renowned Bell for six years while he was a student. Now 33, Bell, a Bloomington native, can add three Grammy awards to his list of accomplishments.\nBell performed on three recordings that received Grammys at this year's award ceremony in Los Angeles. "West Side Story Suite" was named the Best Engineered Classical Album; Bela Fleck's "Perpetual Motion" (on which Bell appeared as a guest) won Best Classical Crossover Album; and a selection Bell performed on Debussy's "Children\'s Corner" took the award for Best Instrumental Arrangement.\n"He is a marvelous violinist," Zweig said. She said his total dedication to everything he plays as one reason for his success.\n"He is able to become completely fascinated with what he is doing, which enables him to focus his concentration, and we hear the results of that," she said.\nNow living in New York City, Bell made his professional debut at age 14, playing with conductor Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Since then, he has gone on to a high-profile career in classical music, sharing the stage with virtually all of the world's leading orchestras. \nIn 2001, Bell won a Grammy for his recording of Nicholas Maw's "Violin Concerto," a work written especially for him. He was also the solo violinist on John Corigliano's Oscar-winning soundtrack for "The Red Violin."\nBell's newest release, for the Sony Classical label, is a treatment of the ever-popular Beethoven and Mendelssohn violin concertos. The novel feature in this recording, however, is that the violinist composed his own cadenzas for both works, a departure from long-standing tradition.\nHis desire to break new ground led him to record the suite from Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story," bridging the gap between music, theater and the mainstream classical audience. Orchestrator William D. Brohn arranged the suite, and on the same album Bell was also reunited with Corigliano, who wrote an arrangement of Bernstein's "Make Our Garden Grow." The violinist has admired Bernstein's work for some time. \n"The ('West Side Story') tunes are incredible, so memorable and so beautiful, that they have really worked their way into the consciousness of most Americans, even into Gap ads," Bell said on his Web site. "'West Side Story' is the best of both worlds, classical and pop. It succeeds on every level, and so well that it seems almost wrong to classify it simply as a musical."\nBell is also convinced of Bernstein's role in building musical bridges during his lifetime.\n"To be able to write something like 'West Side Story' and then be respected by the Vienna Philharmonic -- he did a lot to help raise the profile of Americans in classical music," Bell said on his Web site.\nJane Covner, press representative for JAG Entertainment, which represents Bell, points out that the young violinist has already earned a fair amount of respect not only from the classical music world, but mainstream media as well.\n"Programs such as the Grammys and other shows which Josh has appeared on such as 'The Other Half,' 'Charlie Rose,' 'Conan O\'Brien,' 'Judith Regan,' 'Nightline,' 'CBS This Morning,' 'Access Hollywood' and many others feature Joshua for the same reason they feature other guests," she said. "His outstanding talent, and consensus that he is, as stated by Elle Magazine in June of 2001, 'the most renowned American-born violinist of the modern era."