David Garrett

David Garrett has proved beyond doubt that it’s possible, even desirable, for classically trained soloists to perform concerto dates with world-class orchestras one week and play Nirvana or Hendrix hits the next. The charismatic German violinist famously cast off what he saw as the straitjacket of conformity tailored to fit young classical performers. He has pioneered a personal brand of crossover, fuelled by impassioned rock-star energy and underpinned by impeccable violin technique. Garrett’s stadium gigs and crossover albums, including Virtuoso (2008), Rock Symphonies (2011) and Explosive (2015), have introduced millions to violin classics and brought symphonic grandeur to ’80s power ballads, heavy metal bangers and evergreen pop numbers. Born in Aachen in 1980, Garrett held his first fiddle at the age of four and worked out how to play it within weeks. He followed the well-trodden path of a child prodigy, working tirelessly at technical studies, mastering the mainstream classical repertoire and bagging headline-grabbing debuts with top orchestras before his 10th birthday. His phenomenal progress continued throughout teenage years spent either on the road as a classical soloist or in the recording studio, where the 15-year-old violinist set down an album of Paganini’s fiendishly difficult Caprices. Garrett chose to step off the career treadmill in favour of studies with Itzhak Perlman at New York’s Juilliard School of Music, partly funded with extracurricular work as a fashion model. Since graduating in 2004, Garrett’s boundless musical passions and desire to take artistic risks have found expression not only in such crossover projects as Rock Revolution (2017) and Millennium Symphony (2024) but also in strikingly individual reinterpretations of core classics, including those featured on 2022’s ICONIC.