Performer Biography

Midori is a visionary artist, activist and educator who explores and builds connections between music and the human experience and breaks with traditional boundaries, which makes her one of the most outstanding violinists of our time. She has performed with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and has collaborated with world-renowned musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, and many others. She will mark the 40th anniversary of her professional debut this season, celebrating a remarkable career that began in 1982, when she debuted with the New York Philharmonic at age 11.

This anniversary season is marked by a new recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin performed by Midori and the celebrated pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Warner Classics). The pair performs the complete sonatas at Dartmouth College, and a selection of the sonatas in Chicago. Another highlight of the anniversary season is a project that combines two lifelong passions—the music of Bach and newly commissioned music—in a solo recital tour featuring Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin alongside works by contemporary composers; the tour includes a return to Carnegie Hall in February and concerts in Washington, DC, Seattle and Vancouver, and in San Francisco, Irvine, and La Jolla in California. Midori also appears this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Erie Philharmonic, Toledo Symphony, and Glacier Symphony (Kalispell, Montana). She also performs on tour this season in Europe and Asia.

As someone deeply committed to furthering humanitarian and educational goals, she has founded several non-profit organizations: the New York City-based Midori & Friends, currently celebrating its 30th year; MUSIC SHARING, based in Japan; the Orchestra Residencies Program (ORP), for which Midori commissioned a new work from composer Derek Bermel, which premiered in 2021; and Partners in Performance (PiP), which helps to bring chamber music to smaller communities in the U.S. In recognition of her work as an artist and humanitarian, she serves as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, and in 2021, she was named a Kennedy Center Honoree.

Born in Osaka in 1971, she began her violin studies with her mother, Setsu Goto, at an early age. In 1982, conductor Zubin Mehta invited the then 11-year-old Midori to perform with the New York Philharmonic in the orchestra’s annual New Year’s Eve concert, where the foundation was laid for her following career. Midori is the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and is a Distinguished Visiting Artist at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She plays the 1734 Guarnerius del Gesù ‘ex-Huberman’ and uses four bows—two by Dominique Peccatte, one by François Peccatte, and one by Paul Siefried.