Bravo to Bell

Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell, music director of London’s Academy of St, Martin-in-the-Fields, joined iconic pianist Jeremy Denk in a dazzling duo performance at the Granada.

The tony twosome’s concert, part of the Music Academy of the West’s Summer Festival, featured works by Franck, Beethoven, and Mozart.

The sold-out 90-minute performance featured Mozart’s “Sonata No. 18 for Violin and Piano in G Major,” Beethoven’s “Suite No. 7 for Violin and Piano in C Minor,” and Franck’s “Sonata in A Major,” and a special encore of Clara Schumann’s “3 Romances.”

Bell has played with many of the top orchestras in the world during a stellar four-decade career, while Denk is considered one of America’s foremost pianists and is recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize and the MacArthur 
Genius Fellowship,.

The week wrapped at Hahn Hall on the picturesque Miraflores campus with New Jersey Symphony Orchestra conductor Xian Zhang with Dorothy Chang’s “Northern Star,” Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta,” wrapping with Dvořák’s “Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World.’”

Zhang moved to the U.S. in 1998 as music director of the University of Cincinnati’s concert orchestra before serving as cover conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 2002 to 2004.