Midori
Violin
Midori gave her first public performance at the age of seven, playing a piece from the 24 Caprices of Paganini. She and her mother moved to New York City in 1982 where Midori started violin studies under the renowned instructor Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard Pre-College. As her audition piece Midori performed the 13-minute-long Chaconne by Bach. This is generally considered to be one of the most difficult solo violin pieces ever written. In the same year, she made her concert debut New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, a conductor with whom she would record many concertos on the Sony Classical label. In 1986 would come her now legendary performance at Tanglewood. An astonishing success, she broke the E-string on her violin twice; She thus had to borrow violins from the concertmaster and associate concertmaster in order to finish the piece and had Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, kneeling before her in awe. The next day the New York Times front page carried this headline: "Girl, 14, Conquers Tanglewood with 3 Violins."
When Midori was 15 years old, she decided to leave the Juilliard Pre-College after spending approximately 4 years there. About 5 years later in 1992, she formed Midori & Friends, a non-profit organization that aims to bring quality music education to inner-city children in New York City. In 2001 Midori received the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, an award issued to outstanding musicians only once a year, if at all. With the money from this she started a foundation program called Partners in Performance. In the following years Midori has inaugurated two further community-based projects called the University Residencies Program and the Orchestra Residencies Program.
Midori is the recipient of the 25th Suntory Music Award (1993). In 2000, Midori graduated from New York University's Gallatin School magna cum laude where she studied Psychology, subsequently earning a Master's Degree in Psychology from NYU a few years later. Midori has been appointed to the Jascha Heifetz Chair in Music at USC's Thornton School of Music, where she currently chairs the Strings Department. Previously, she was on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music. Midori is also a board member of the American String Teachers Association.
