Andrew McIntosh
Andrew McIntosh is a Grammy-nominated violinist, violist, composer, and baroque violinist who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, with a wide swath of musical interests ranging from historical performance practice of the Baroque era to improvisation, microtonal tuning systems, and the 20th-century avant-garde. He holds degrees in violin performance, composition, and early music performance from the University of Nevada, Reno, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Southern California.
As a baroque performer McIntosh is a member of Tesserae, Bach Collegium San Diego, and Musica Angelica, has served as guest concertmaster for baroque operas with LA Opera and Opera UCLA, was recently both music director and concertmaster of Long Beach Opera's all-Handel pastiche production "The Feast”, and has performed with the Washington National Cathedral Baroque Orchestra, Musica Pacifica, and the American Bach Soloists. He is also a frequent recitalist, performing with historical keyboardist Ian Pritchard and fortepianist Steven Vanhauwaert, and also appeared at the San Francisco Symphony's SoundBox series in 2016 performing solo Bach on baroque violin.
As a solo artist he has performed at Miller Theatre in New York, REDCAT, and festivals and concert series across Europe and the US. He also was the viola soloist in the US premiere of Gèrard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques, for which performance the LA Times said he “played with commanding beauty”. As a chamber musician he is a member of the Formalist Quartet, Wild Up, and Wadada Leo Smith’s Red Koral Quartet, with whom he recently recorded a 7-CD box set of Smith’s String Quartets 1-12, available on TUM Records. He has worked personally with a wide range of composers including Christian Wolff, Sofia Gubaidulina, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Helmut Lachenmann, Tom Johnson, and Jürg Frey.
As a composer he often works with forms and ideas found in nature or in other artistic disciplines, working in instrumental, vocal, and fixed media forms, and was described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as “a composer preternaturally attuned to the landscapes and soundscapes of the West". His compositions have been featured at venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall, Ojai Festival, Big Ears Festival, the Gaudeamus Festival, Time:Spans Festival, Hamburger Klangwerktage, Moments Musicaux Aarau, Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemasse Muzik, Miller Theatre, National Sawdust, Issue Project Room, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tectonics Festival Glasgow. The individual musical personalities of performers he writes for are a central consideration in his work, and he has worked particularly closely with the musicians of Wild Up, the Formalist Quartet, Yarn/Wire, and soprano Estelí Gomez. Recent commissions include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Industry opera company, Yarn/Wire, the Calder Quartet, and violinists Ilya Gringolts, Movses Pogossian, Lorenz Gamma, and Marco Fusi.Originally from rural Northern Nevada, McIntosh is currently based in the Los Angeles area.
