Andrew McIntosh

The activities of the versatile musician Andrew McIntosh extend from Baroque historical performance to contemporary music, which he pursues as both performer (on violin, Baroque violin, and viola) and composer. McIntosh is a member of several major contemporary music-oriented chamber music groups and is also an educator. McIntosh was born in 1985 and grew up in rural northern Nevada. He took up the violin at age five, and performance and composition were both part of his musical life from the beginning; shortly after he began violin studies, he wrote a song on a piece of paper that he still owns. In the family's remote location, he found violin teachers but had few opportunities to hear his music performed. A key experience came when he was 12, when he was taken to hear a performance of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 7, Op. 108. At the University of Nevada, Reno, he studied violin with Phillip Ruder and immersed himself in contemporary music whenever he could. McIntosh went on to the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California, earning degrees in violin performance, composition, and historical performance. He made his recording debut in 2007 as a violist on the album Anne LeBaron: Pope Joan, Transfiguration, backing vocalist Lucy Shelton. McIntosh has been equally active as a performer and a composer. As a Baroque violinist and violist, he is a member of several major historical performance groups, including the Bach Collegium San Diego, Tesserae, and Musica Angelica, and he has appeared with the Washington National Cathedral Baroque Orchestra, the American Bach Soloists, and several southern California opera companies in Baroque productions. He has performed as a soloist at New York's Miller Theatre, the downtown Los Angeles venue REDCAT, and festivals and concert series in Europe as well as the U.S. McIntosh was the viola soloist in the U.S. premiere of Gérard Grisey's Les Espaces Acoustiques, and he is a member of the contemporary chamber groups Wild Up, the Formalist Quartet, and the Red Koral Quartet of trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. His compositions have been heard at such venues as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands, and the Tectonics Festival Glasgow in Scotland. Eight of his compositions were available on recordings as of early 2024. McIntosh has been featured on albums by cellist Ashley Walters, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, and violinist David Rosenboom, among others, and in 2022, he issued an album of his own work, Little Jimmy, performed by the contemporary chamber group Yarn/Wire. In 2023, McIntosh was featured on the Olde Focus Recordings release Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Three Sonatas for Violin & Fortepiano, Op. 1b.
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