Biography

Julian Brown was born in the UK and began playing the violin at the age of 8, later studying with British violinist and teacher Anthony Saltmarsh. After playing in several orchestras in London, and working for the BBC as a radio producer, he came to the US in 1998, where he has been an active member of the classical music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has served as long-term concertmaster for several orchestras including Palo Alto Philharmonic, Cambrian Symphony, and California Pops Orchestra, and as guest concertmaster for Winchester Orchestra. He is currently concertmaster of the Saratoga Symphony. Besides his orchestral and chamber music appearances, he has performed as soloist in Philip Glass's Violin Concerto, Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Spohr's Violin Concerto No. 8 "Gesangscene," Bach's Double Violin Concerto, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, and film scores such as Schindler's List and Cinema Paradiso.

He is cofounder, with pianist Tamami Honma, of the Cal Arte Ensemble, which has performed numerous chamber concerts featuring violin and piano works including all ten of Beethoven's Violin Sonatas, and some of the greatest masterworks for piano trio, quartet, and quintet including those by Arensky, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Shostakovich. Their performance of Beethoven's Archduke Piano Trio received praise in the San Francisco Classical Voice: "What it needs is the joy in life brought to it by these players. Their relaxed flexibility in phrasing made everything roll along." In 2018 they presented complete performances of all five Beethoven Piano Concertos and Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Mozart's Requiem, and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat.

In recent years, Julian has been teaching violin and piano and was invited in 2019 to conduct violin masterclasses for Vantage Academy of Music of Hong Kong for students presenting a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. During the COVID pandemic, he produced a number of video concert presentations including complete virtual performances of Vivaldi's Gloria, Fauré's Requiem, and Beethoven's Opferlied. Besides his roles as performer and producer, Julian previously contributed program notes for many Bay Area concerts. He also worked with Tamami Honma as producer and sound engineer on her recordings of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas released by Divine Art Recordings, for which he also wrote an 88-page booklet of liner notes.