American violinist Melissa White has enchanted audiences and critics around the world as both a soloist and a chamber musician. White emerges from the summer of 2022 resplendent with new achievements and milestones in a skyrocketing career that continues to span the globe.
In June of 2022, Ms.White made history as the concertmaster of the Recollective Orchestra, the first all-Black orchestra to perform onstage at the Hollywood Bowl. The occasion, aired live on CNN, was a Juneteenth program presented by the LA Philharmonic to mark the Bowl’s centenary. In August, Ms.White made her Aspen Music Festival and School debut performing and conducting Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a wonderful opportunity for her to engineer, as she termed it, “a true collaborative experience” with AMFS student musicians.
This fall, the violinist embarked on a European concert tour that included her debut in Ireland and a return to London’s Wigmore Hall with the Kaleidoscope Collective for a program of Coleridge-Taylor, White, Price, and Dvořák. Ms. White is scheduled to make her Carnegie Hall recital debut in June of 2023.
Ms. White’s recent orchestral activity includes return engagements with the National Philharmonic and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and debut performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra as well as Richmond, Cincinnati, and Midland Symphony Orchestras, the Northwest Sinfonietta, the Brevard Music Center and Heartland Festival Orchestras, as well as The Juilliard Orchestra, whom she joined with only 3 days’ notice to perform Florence Price’s Concerto No.1 in January 2022.
Ms. White is a founding member of New York-based Harlem Quartet, where since 2006 her passion and artistry have contributed to performances hailed for “bringing a new attitude to classical music, one that is fresh, bracing and intelligent” (Cincinnati Enquirer). Together with Harlem Quartet, she has worked with such classical-music luminaries as Itzhak Perlman, Ida Kavakian, Paul Katz, and Anthony McGill; appeared in many of the country’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, the White House, and the Kennedy Center; and performed throughout the U.S., as well as in Europe, Africa, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Harlem Quartet was named quartet-in-residence at Montclair State University in the fall of 2021, and has served as the visiting quartet-in-residence at the Royal College of Music in London since 2016.
Ms. White currently serves as Music Artist Faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and, as of fall of 2022, she is also Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo. She looks forward to her Sarasota Music Festival debut as a faculty member in June of 2023.
A native of Michigan, she holds performance degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and New England Conservatory, where her teachers included Jaime Laredo, Ida Kavafian, Donald Weilerstein, and Miriam Fried.
In addition to her musical career, Ms. White has enjoyed practicing various styles of yoga for more than a decade, and completed training in both Vinyasa and Ashtanga at Sampoorna Yoga School in Goa, India. She is the co-founder of Intermission, a groundbreaking program that unites body, mind, breath, and music-making through yoga and meditation; the program comprises sessions for students, retreats for professionals, and an app for everyone.
Melissa is incredibly grateful to be playing a c1780 Ferdinando Gagliano violin, currently on loan from Strumenti. Patron- investors can help keep this violin in Melissa’s hands by investing in it online at strumenti.com. Melissa White is represented worldwide by New York-based Sciolino Artist Management.