Playing Basketball As Well As His Stradivarius

The violinist Joshua Bell stars in a new PBS special, “Joshua Bell: At Home With Music,” that is streaming in the U.S. through this weekend. The special features a musical soirée with intimate performances from his home north of New York City, and shares a behind-the-scenes look at his family and personal musical inspirations. 

A companion album, Joshua Bell: At Home With Music—with audio recordings of the special’s musical performances—was released digitally by Sony Classical earlier this month.

Besides the performances by Bell and his wife, soprano Larisa Martínez, the recital also features guest artists and friends, pianists Jeremy Denk, Peter Dugan and Kamal Khan. The program includes works ranging from Beethoven’s “Spring Sonata” and Chopin’s Nocture in E-flat Major to a newly-envisioned West Side Story medley and Gershwin’s “Summertime.”

With more than 40 CDs recorded during a career spanning over 30 years as a soloist, chamber musician, conductor and director, Bell is one of the most celebrated violinists of his era. Since 2011, he has also served as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, succeeding Sir Neville Marriner, who founded the orchestra in 1958.

In a recent interview, Bell said the PBS program also features his three sons, ten-year-old twins and a thirteen year old, who play, respectively, the violin, piano and cello. He said he hoped they would inspire other parents to have their children take music lessons, and “see the joy” music could bring to their home.

Bell said the pandemic had forced him to give up his normally “very hectic lifestyle,” which requires him to travel 200 days a year. “I enjoy the adrenalin, I seem to thrive on that way of life,” he said.

Immediately before the pandemic, he had just finished a 19-day, 17-city U.S. tour with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, but decided not to proceed with a subsequent European tour with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.

Since then, he has been living in his home north of Manhattan, ”taking advantage of time” he normally doesn’t have to practice, work on new musical arrangements with his wife and see his children “a lot more.”

“It’s allowed me to have time to evaluate my relationship with my kids, wife and music. It’s changed my perspective on working and practicing, allowed for introspection,” he said.

His home has a basketball court, where Bell said he is “perfecting” his shooting skills an hour and a half daily, losing 13 pounds in the process. “I’m finding myself in better shape than I’ve been in, in a while,” he said, something that has been aided by eating three meals a day at home, rather than at restaurants on the road.   

“I’ve been talking for years about a sabbatical, someday I’m going to take a six-month sabbatical and do precisely what I’ve been doing these six months, but I kept putting it off, putting it off. So it was  basically a forced sabbatical,” he explained. 

 Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell began playing the violin at the age of four, and at age twelve began studies with Josef Gingold. At 14, he debuted with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, debuting at Carnegie Hall at age 17 with the St. Louis Symphony. He received the 2007 Avery Fisher Prize and has been named Musical America’s 2010 “Instrumentalist of the Year” and an “Indiana Living Legend.”

 Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin, with a François Tourte 18th-Century bow.