Midori

At fourteen, playing Bernstein's Serenade at Tanglewood in 1986 with the composer conducting, Midori broke a string, borrowed the concertmaster's Stradivari, broke a string on that too, finished the piece on a third violin and the performance was reported on the front page of the New York Times. Born Midori Gotō in Osaka in 1971, she was taught first by her mother, Setsu Gotō, and had already made her New York Philharmonic debut under Zubin Mehta at eleven. The concert career that followed — the major orchestras, recordings — has been matched by a second one in education and community work: Midori & Friends, founded in 1992, and the programmes that grew from it. She took the Avery Fisher Prize in 2001, was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2007, and was among the Kennedy Center honorees of 2021. She has taught at the University of Southern California and, since 2018, at the Curtis Institute, and plays the ex-Huberman Guarneri del Gesù. She was the featured violin soloist on a Hindemith album with Christoph Eschenbach and the NDR Symphony Orchestra that won the 2014 Grammy for Best Classical Compendium, and in 2020 she recorded the Beethoven concerto with the Festival Strings Lucerne, followed by the complete Beethoven sonatas with Jean-Yves Thibaudet. At Curtis she holds the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in violin studies, and has also taught at the Peabody Institute; her Japanese foundation, Music Sharing, takes Western and Japanese music into schools, hospitals and institutions across Asia. She joined the Juilliard faculty in 2025 while continuing to teach at Curtis. In 2023 she was appointed to lead the piano and strings programme of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, overseeing its summer programme from 2024.