Mark O’Connor
PopTech 2009
The Los Angeles Times has called Mark O’Connor “one of the most talented and imaginative artists working in music—any music—today,” and The New York Times claims he’s “the only musician today who can reach so deeply first into the refined, then the vernacular, giving his listeners a complex, sophisticated piece of early-21st-century classical music and then knocking them dead with the brown-dirt whine of a Texas fiddle.”
A product of America’s aural folk tradition as well as classical and flamenco music, O’Connor has crafted a new American classical music, and a vision of an entirely American school of string playing. His first recording, Appalachia Waltz, was a collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer and gained him worldwide recognition. The follow-up release, Appalachian Journey, received a Grammy Award in 2001. O’Connor’s first full length orchestral score, Fiddle Concerto, has since become the most-performed modern violin concerto, and his work has been recorded by, among many others, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. He composes, records, teaches, and performs at an astounding pace, in addition to conducting annual Mark O’Connor String Camps in New York, California, and Tennessee.
markoconnor.com