Andrew Jennings
Andrew Jennings was the Susan Monahan & Mark Brucks Artist-in-Residence for June 2020.
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 and his current membership in the Concord Trio. As a leading exponent of new music, he has given nearly three-hundred 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. His chamber music studies were with the Juilliard and Budapest String Quartets. 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.
Jennings' 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, and include 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 professor of violin and chamber music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and on the artist faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts where, for the past twenty-four 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 Kurtág, as well as frequent recitals with his wife, Gail, and numerous appearances at chamber music festivals and series. The Jennings’ three daughters are all professional musicians. Their four grandchildren make joyous noise as well.
