Joshua Bell / Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Joshua Bell is »perhaps the USA’s most brilliant and professional violinist« according to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He also demonstrated in an experiment with the Washington Post in 2007 that he is one of the most unconventional. Incognito in street clothes and baseball hat, he took his Stradivarius violin to a Washington, D.C. subway station and played pieces by great composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach for 43 minutes. The stunt earned the Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize; it earned Joshua Bell an audience of seven and $32.17. But he can expect a far bigger audience at his Elbphilharmonie debut. Alongside the amazing Academy of St Martin in the Fields, whose Musical Director Bell became in 2011, he will fulfil a double role – as a soloist in Beethoven’s only violin concerto and as a conductor for the great composer’s Fifth Symphony.