Callum Smart

Among Britain's most highly regarded violinists who arrived on the scene in the early 21st century, Callum Smart began winning important prizes in his early teens. Partly trained in the U.S., he also enjoys a strong following there. Smart was born in 1997 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. At six, he was introduced to the violin by an enthusiastic teacher and quickly settled on the violin as a career. In 2010, at age 13, he won the strings category of the BBC Young Musicians Competition, playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, and in the same year, he was the top European prize-winner at the Menuhin Competition, held that year in Oslo. Smart attended the Yehudi Menuhin School and Chetham's School of Music. His primary teachers in Britain were Maciej Rakowski and Mauricio Fuks. Smart went on to the University of Indiana's Jacobs School of Music under a Premier Young Artist Scholarship, and while there, he began performing in North America, appearing with the Calgary Philharmonic and the Fort Wayne Philharmonic in Indiana. Back in Britain, he enrolled in a postgraduate program at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where he has also taught violin. In Britain, Smart has performed with many of the country's leading orchestras, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and the Philharmonia Orchestra multiple times. He has given recitals at such top-rank venues as London's Wigmore Hall, the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris, as well as appearing at various European summer festivals. Signed to the Orchid Classics label while he was still in his mid-teens, Smart released an album of violin-and-piano works by Chausson, Franck, and Grieg with pianist Gordon Back in 2014. He has released several more albums on Orchid Classics, including 2020's Transatlantic, a collection of British and American pieces, including an arrangement of Amazing Grace for solo violin. Smart devoted the coronavirus pandemic of that year to growing his social media presence, increasing his follower count exponentially. His videos allowed viewers to follow along as he solved technical problems on the violin.
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