Jonathan Crow

Violinist Jonathan Crow has played a major role in the musical life of his native Canada as a soloist, chamber player, and educator. In the early 2000s, he was both the concertmaster and the youngest member of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Crow was born in the remote Pacific city of Prince George, British Columbia, in 1977. He took up the violin at age six and did his undergraduate work at British Columbia's Victoria Conservatory, moving to McGill University in Montreal for a Master's degree. Before earning that degree in 1998, he had already won a place in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He became not only the orchestra's youngest player but also the youngest concertmaster of a major North American orchestra. He was helped along by a scholarship from Chicago's Ravinia Festival, and he made appearances as a soloist under conductor Yehudi Menuhin during this period. After joining the Guarneri, Emerson, Vermeer, and Tokyo Quartets in guest appearances, Crow formed the string trio Triskelion in Canada in 2004. He is also a founding member of the New Orford String Quartet. Crow began teaching violin at McGill in 2005, reached the rank of associate professor in 2010, and moved to the University of Toronto the following year; one motivation was that he had been appointed concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. As a soloist, he has championed new works by Canadian composers including Healey Willan, Ernest MacMillan, Christos Hatzis, Marjian Mozetich, Barrie Cabena, Michael Conway Baker, and Eldon Rathburn. Crow has recorded as a soloist and chamber player for the Oxingale, XXI, Bridge, CBC, and ATMA Classique labels; in 2018, that group of labels expanded when he joined violinist Douglas McNabney and cellist Matt Haimovitz in a reissued recording of Mozart's music for string trio on the PentaTone Classics from the Netherlands. Crow plays a del Gesù violin from the year 1738.
© James Manheim /TiVo