Andrew Jennings

Naumburg-Award-winning violinist Andrew Jennings, has achieved international acclaim as both a performer and a teacher. As a soloist and chamber musician he has appeared in virtually every state and province in the US and Canada as well as most of the major cities of Europe. He can be heard on recordings for RCA, Nonesuch, Vox, Turnabout, CRI, Danacord, Crystal and MMO and these recordings have twice received Grammy recognition. Television appearances both here and abroad have also received numerous awards including an Emmy. His chamber music career has included a sixteen-year tenure with the acclaimed Concord String Quartet as well as the Gabrielli Trio. As a leading exponent of new music he has given nearly three-hundred-fifty premiere performances as well as acclaimed surveys of the complete chamber and duo works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ives, Brahms, Rochberg, Bartok and others. His primary teachers were Pamela Gearhart, Alexander Schneider and Ivan Galamian and his chamber music studies were with the Juilliard and Budapest String Quartets. Mr. Jennings’ teaching credentials include long-term appointments as artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College and twenty-five years as professor at the Oberlin College Conservatory. His students have won important international competitions such as Naumburg and Fischoff and hold positions in orchestras, string quartets and universities throughout this country and abroad including two winners of the Avery Fisher Prize. He has performed with many of the world’s greatest musicians including Richard Goode, Garrick Ohlsson, Jorge Bolet, Lukas Foss, Manahem Pressler, Bernard Greenhouse, Walter Trampler, James Levine, Stephanie Blythe, Dawn Upshaw, the Juilliard Quartet, Donald Weilerstein, Josept Kalichstein, Alexander Schneider and others. He currently is Emeritus Professor of violin and chamber music at the University of Michigan in Ann and on the artist faculty of the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts where for the past thirty years he has held the Richard Burgin Master Teacher Chair. Recent concerts have taken him around the country playing the 51 Solo Caprice Variations by American composer George Rochberg, the Kafka Fragments of Gyorgy Kurtag as well as frequent recitals with his wife, Gail and numerous appearances at chamber music festivals and series. In 2016 he gave the world premieres of eight new works and played the complete works of Bach for violin in three recitals. A PBS documentary/portrait on the integration of a Western string quartet and a trio of indigenous Ecuadoran musicians, Musica Mestiza is aired throughout the country and has been nominated for an Emmy. The Jennings’ three daughters are all professional musicians (and alums of the TMC) and their four grandsons make joyful noise as well. His video performance of the Rochberg Caprices as well as a large collection of recordings by the Concord Quartet can be found on youTube.