Nicholas Brown
Instrument: Violin
Studies:
Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA)
Biography:
Nicholas Brown studies violin at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) under the teaching of Almita and Roland Vamos. He was selected this year as CCPA’s 2016-17 Gloria Miner Music Scholarship recipient, and has received a four year full tuition merit scholarship for the duration of his studies at CCPA. Previously, he was the Rachel Barton Pine Merit Scholarship Fellow at the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy, a training center for advanced pre-college musicians, where he studied violin with Almita and Roland Vamos for three years. Nicholas plays on a 1910 Vincenzo Postiglione violin, generously on loan to him by the Virtu Foundation.
Nicholas made his solo orchestral debut at the age of nine, playing with the International Gathering of Youth Orchestras. His solo performance led Nicholas and his siblings to be featured in two segments on Fox News. He has subsequently gone on to perform solos with the Loudoun Symphony Orchestra, the Landon Symphonette, and the MIC Academy Orchestra, and to win top honors in many competitions, including the U.S. Army Orchestra Young Artist Competition, the Asian American International Music Competition, the Alexander and Buono International String Competition, the Loudoun Symphony Competition, the Bland Competition, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra’s Feuer Competition, and the Music Festival in Honor of Confucius Competition.
Recently Nicholas was awarded the 2016 Park Ridge Civic Orchestra’s J. Mark Waltz Memorial Scholarship.
He was also a Semifinalist in the Cooper International Violin Competition, and he was named a 2015 National YoungArts Winner. He has been featured twice in the Alden Theater Young Soloist Series and has performed in New York City (both at Carnegie Hall and at Kosciuszko Foundation Auditorium), throughout the Washington DC area (at the Kennedy Center, the Music Center at Strathmore, and the Bulgarian Embassy), and in many venues throughout Virginia, Maryland and Illinois (including Chicago’s Harris Theater and Ravinia’s Bennett-Gordon Hall).
In addition to performing solo, Nicholas enjoys playing chamber and orchestra music. Recent performances include performing with his siblings on WFMT's Introductions as part of Make Music Chicago's live broadcast and at the Lakeforest Symphony’s 2015 Music in the Garden. As part of a violin/piano duo, Nicholas won the Levine Chamber Music Competition and was subsequently featured at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. As a member of the Premier Quartet, Nicholas won First Prize in the 2015 Naperville Women’s Club Young Adult Music Competition, Third Prize in the 2015 A.N. & Pearl G. Barnett Chamber Music Competition, was a Finalist in the 2015 St. Paul String Quartet Competition, and was a Semifinalist in the 2015 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. He also performed as part of Trio Radi at the 2014 North Shore Chamber Music Festival, and had the privilege of playing with Anne Akiko Myers and Vadim Gluzman as part of their chamber orchestra. He played first violin in the 2015 Chicago Youth in Music Festival with Ricardo Muti, and he served as concertmaster of the New North Shore Chamber Orchestra over the past year.
Nicholas has taken master classes with Ilya Kaler, Rachel Barton Pine, Shirley Givens, Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer of the Emerson String Quarter, the Ying Quartet, Jonathan Carney, Erin Keefe, Kelly Hall-Tompkins, Lambert Orkis, Jody Gatwood, the Pointsett Piano Trio, Alessio Bax, Nurit Pacht and Igor Yuzefovich, among others.
