This summer, Joshua Bell plays recitals and chamber music with Jeremy Denk and Steven Isserlis; performs at Bravo! Vail, Minnesota Beethoven, Rockport Chamber Music, and Verbier festivals; leads ASMF at festivals in U.S. and Europe

(May 2026) — Grammy winner Joshua Bell – as of last fall an honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to Music – looks forward to a host of performances at U.S. and European festivals this summer, often in collaboration with his frequent recital partners Jeremy Denk and Steven Isserlis or with London’s Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF), where he is in his 14th season as Music Director. Bell performs duo recitals with Denk as part of the Colburn Celebrity Recital series at Walt Disney Concert Hall (June 3) and then at the Ravinia Festival (June 5), and a month later the Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio & Friends give all-Schumann performances at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (July 5) and at The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) (July 7 & 9). Bell also gives two more chamber performances with Isserlis at the Verbier Festival along with pianist Richard Goode and others (July 20 & 22). Bell performs with his wife, soprano Larisa Martínez, at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (July 2). With the full ASMF orchestra, Bell play-directs concerts at Bravo! Vail (June 28), the Minnesota Beethoven Festival (June 30 & July 1), Croatia’s Dubrovnik Summer Festival (July 14) and Germany’s Rheingau Musik Festival (July 17), variously performing violin concertos by Saint-Saëns and Mendelssohn, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Schumann’s First Symphony, and more. Also a leading proponent of rediscovery, Bell continues his advocacy for Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann’s long-lost Violin Concerto, which the violinist released on a Diapason d’Or-winning recording two summers ago and performed live across the past season on both sides of the Atlantic. He performs the work this summer with the Verbier Festival Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Harding (July 23). Finally, Bell performs Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy with Ohio’s Springfield Symphony led by Peter Stafford Wilson (July 30) and at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons (Aug 2).

Chamber music with Denk, Isserlis, Goode, and more

In June, Bell gives performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall (June 3) and then at Ravinia (June 5) of solo works and duo sonatas by Schubert, Grieg, and Ravel with Avery Fisher Prize winner Jeremy Denk, a longtime piano partner with whom he shares “the sixth sense that characterizes the closest musical relationships” (The New York Times). Later in the summer, cellist Steven Isserlis joins in as the Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio & Friends focus on Schumann’s chamber music. At the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (July 5) and at New York’s 92NY (July 7 & 9), Bell joins his partners – with the addition of violinist Irène Duval and violist Blythe Teh Engstroem – in various configurations for Schumann’s First Violin Sonata, First and Third Piano Trios, and his Quartet and Quintet for Piano and Strings.

At the Verbier Festival, Bell and Isserlis reprise Schumann’s First Piano Trio with pianist Richard Goode (July 20), before performing a program of Fauré and Schubert with Duval, Teh Engstroem, and pianist Mao Fujita (July 22). These programs form two-thirds of a three-concert residency for Bell at the festival, following a February residency at Verbier’s inaugural Winter Asian Chapter in Shenzhen, China.

Bell and his wife, soprano Larisa Martínez, created the concept for their celebrated “Voice and the Violin” collaboration during the pandemic, and have toured the program since 2021. The program explores repertoire ranging from classical art song and opera to musical theater and selections by Puerto Rican and Spanish composers. This summer, Bell and Martínez present “Voice and the Violin” at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (July 2).

ASMF performances, de Hartmann concerto, and more

Since succeeding Sir Neville Marriner as Music Director of London’s Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF) in 2011, Bell has “brought a new bite and vigour to the band’s well-established aristocratic nobility,” which makes for “captivating music-making” (The Scotsman). Indeed, the success of their multifaceted partnership has been recognized with a Grammy nomination and the extension of Bell’s contract through the 2027-28 season. As the UK’s Arts Desk puts it: “Who needs a conductor with a leader-soloist of this calibre?”

On the heels of both European and North American tours this past season, Bell and the ASMF return to the States for performances at the Bravo! Vail festival and the Minnesota Beethoven Festival, both featuring a symphony led by Bell from the violin and a concerto with Bell as soloist. A previous U.S. tour earned Bell and the ASMF a five-star review from Bachtrack, which marveled:

“What was unique about Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields’ concert … was its depth and delivery of life. … It was as if the music expanded as it unfolded, and we were elasticized by it, ready to go wherever it led. Bell and the orchestra in perfect tandem, Bell’s playing itself becoming the conductor as he plied his bow. … Clearly, the ASMF is a vibrant, living unit, each section tightly connected to its counterparts.”

In Vail, they perform Saint-Saëns’s Third Violin Concerto along with Schumann’s First “Spring” Symphony, and the program opens with a work that they featured on their U.S. tour this past spring: an original arrangement of Ives’s Variations on “America,” newly commissioned by the orchestra to mark America250. Based on Ives’s own arrangement of a traditional tune, familiar to U.S. audiences as “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee)” and to British ones as their national anthem, ASMF’s new arrangement is by distinguished British composer-arranger Iain Farrington (June 28). A similar program – with Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture in place of the Ives – will be the first of two presented at the Minnesota Beethoven Festival (June 30). The second Minnesota performance the next day opens with Ives’s Variations on “America” and then pairs Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with Mendelssohn’s E-minor Violin Concerto (July 1).

Later in July, Bell and the ASMF return to Europe for two more festivals: Croatia’s Dubrovnik Summer Festival (July 14) and Germany’s Rheingau Musik Festival (July 17). Both performances again feature Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony paired with Mendelssohn’s E-minor Violin Concerto, this time with Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides as the opener.

After chamber music performances at the Verbier Festival, Bell closes his summer schedule as a soloist under other conductors. With the Verbier Festival Orchestra and conductor Daniel Harding, he reprises a work that he not only played a major role in bringing to light but has continued to champion all season: the Violin Concerto by Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann (1884–1956). Following his Diapason d’Or-winning world premiere recording of the work for Pentatone in 2024, in partnership with Ukrainian-born Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska, he gave the concerto’s UK premiere at London’s BBC Proms, North American premiere with the New York Philharmonic, Canadian premiere with the Toronto Symphony, and performances with the Boston Symphony and Oslo Philharmonic. At the UK premiere, Seen and Heard International observed:

“Bell (playing from a handwritten score) made every compelling argument he could for the concerto: his tone could not have been more beautiful to the ear (and what a large, full tone he makes), and the virtuosity was simply astounding: tempestuous, pounding dance rhythms, brilliant syncopations on the instrument, and there was a wonderful glaze to his sound when playing the slow movement, the music almost hypnotically done. The final movement brought an electrifying freneticism to Bell’s playing – all with astonishing purity of sound.”

Bell concludes the summer with two performances of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, first with Ohio’s Springfield Symphony under the baton of Peter Stafford Wilson and then at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Andris Nelsons. His recording of the work drew a five-star review from BBC Music Magazine, while Gramophone found it “utterly irresistible.”

Chopin single success

Beyond the concert hall, Bell is an exclusive Sony Classical artist who has recorded more than 40 albums, winning Grammy, Mercury, Gramophone, Diapason D’Or, and Opus Klassik awards. He expanded this catalogue last fall with the release of Chopin: Nocturne in E-flat, a single recorded with Krzysztof Urbański and Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. Capturing Bell’s own arrangement of the piano piece for violin and strings, the recording has already been streamed more than one million times.

See Bell performing Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat live

Joshua Bell: summer 2026 engagements

June 3 & 5: U.S. duo recitals with Jeremy Denk, piano
   June 3: Los Angeles, CA (Walt Disney Concert Hall; Colburn Celebrity Recital)
   June 5: Highland Park, IL (Ravinia Festival)
SCHUBERT: Sonata for Violin and Piano in A, D. 574, “Duo”
GRIEG: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 in C minor, Op. 45
IVES: “Hawthorne” from Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840–1860”
YSAŸE: Violin Sonata in D minor, Op. 27, No. 3, “Ballade”
RAVEL: Violin Sonata No. 2

June 26
Vail, CO
Bravo! Vail Music Festival
Soirée I
Members of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Joshua Bell, violin
Harvey de Souza, violin
Martin Burgess, violin
Fiona Bonds, viola
Richard Harwood, cello
Larisa Martínez, soprano
PURCELL (arr. Britten): Chaconne in G minor
MOZART: Allegro from String Quintet No. 4
MENDELSSOHN: “Ah, ritorna, età dell’oro” (Cavatina and Cabaletta) from Infelice

June 28
Vail, CO
Bravo! Vail Music Festival
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
IVES (arr. Farrington): Variations on “America”
SAINT-SAËNS: Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, Op. 61
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 1 in B-flat, “Spring”

June 30
Winona, MN
Minnesota Beethoven Festival
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
BEETHOVEN: Coriolan Overture, Op. 62
SAINT-SAËNS: Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, Op. 61
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 1 in B-flat, “Spring”

July 1
Winona, MN
Minnesota Beethoven Festival
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
IVES (arr. Farrington): Variations on “America”
MENDELSSOHN: Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67

July 2
Rockport, MA
Rockport Chamber Music Festival
“The Voice and the Violin”
Larisa Martínez, soprano
Peter Dugan, piano

July 5
Rockport, MA
Rockport Chamber Music Festival
Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio & Friends
Steven Isserlis, cello
Jeremy Denk, piano
Irène Duval, violin
Blythe Teh Engstroem, viola
SCHUMANN: Fantasiestücke for piano trio, Op. 88
SCHUMANN: Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 110
SCHUMANN: Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 94
SCHUMANN: Quartet, Op. 47

July 7
New York, NY
92NY
Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio & Friends
Steven Isserlis, cello
Jeremy Denk, piano
Irène Duval, violin
Blythe Teh Engstroem, viola
SCHUMANN: Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, Op. 105
SCHUMANN: Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 63
SCHUMANN: Adagio and Allegro for Cello and Piano, Op. 70
SCHUMANN: Piano Quintet in E-flat, Op. 44

July 9
New York, NY
92NY
Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio & Friends
Steven Isserlis, cello
Jeremy Denk, piano
Irène Duval, violin
Blythe Teh Engstroem, viola
SCHUMANN: Fantasiestücke for piano trio, Op. 88
SCHUMANN: Piano Trio No. 3, Op. 110
SCHUMANN: Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 94
SCHUMANN: Quartet, Op. 47

July 14, 17
   July 14: Dubrovnik, Croatia (Dubrovnik Summer Festival)
   July 17: Wiesbaden, Germany (Rheingau Musik Festival)
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
MENDELSSOHN: The Hebrides, Op. 26 (Fingal’s Cave)
MENDELSSOHN: Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67

July 20
Verbier, Switzerland
Verbier Festival
Steven Isserlis, cello
Richard Goode, piano
SCHUMANN: Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor Op. 63

July 22
Verbier, Switzerland
Verbier Festival
Steven Isserlis, cello
Irène Duval, violin
Blythe Teh Engstroem, viola
Mao Fujita, piano
FAURÉ: String Quartet in E minor, Op. 121
SCHUBERT: Piano Trio in E-flat, D. 929

July 23
Verbier, Switzerland
Verbier Festival
Verbier Festival Orchestra
Daniel Harding, conductor
DE HARTMANN: Violin Concerto, Op. 66

July 30
Springfield, OH
Springfield Symphony Orchestra
Peter Stafford Wilson, conductor
BRUCH: Scottish Fantasy

Aug 2
Lenox, MA
Tanglewood
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor
BRUCH: Scottish Fantasy