Judson Griffin, baroque violin and viola, appears regularly in New York as concertmaster of Concert Royal, Amor Artis, and the American Classical Orchestra, among others. This season, in addition to regular return engagements as concertmaster of the Florida Pro Musica and Dallas Bach Society, he was guest soloist and concertmaster with New Trinity Baroque in Atlanta. He has been associated with the Connecticut Early Music Festival for many years as concertmaster, soloist, and conductor, and is now in his third year as music director. He served as concertmaster for the Maryland Handel Festival’s final years of its survey of Handel oratorios, and as music director of the Clarion Music Society in New York for its final year. He has been a principal player with Helicon, the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra, and Apollo’s Fire of Cleveland; and concertmaster of the Philadelphia Classical Orchestra. Mr. Griffin led an orchestra for dance performances at the Maggio musicale in Florence, and led the Lobkowitz Quartet in performances of Haydn’s Seven Last Words in Germany. He has toured with the English Concert and Trevor Pinnock; played with the Akademie der alten Musik in Berlin; with the Complesso barocco in Innsbruck, Milan, and Venice; and has been a soloist at the Festival de Clisson, France. Solo recitals have been given in Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., in New York at Weill Recital Hall and Merkin Hall, and in Alaska. Mr. Griffin is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and earned a doctorate at The Juilliard School. He plays a baroque violin by Gio. Paolo Maggini, Brescia, ca. 1610-20, and a classical violin by Claude Pierray, Paris, 1707.
Mr. Griffin’s more than 60 recordings include new music from the mid-1970s to early 1980s; quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven on period instruments with the Smithson String Quartet, of which he was a member for 10 years; the Schubert Octet with the European ensemble Atlantis; recordings with Philharmonia of San Francisco and Tafelmusik of Toronto, among others; works of Richard Strauss, Elgar, and Barber with the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra on modern instruments strung in gut; and the Mozart Requiem and Haydn Creation as concertmaster of Amor Artis, all on period instruments. In an earlier career Mr. Griffin was a prize-winning viola soloist and champion of contemporary music; he was a member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, principal viola of the Aspen Chamber Symphony for 5 years, and a member of the New York Chamber Soloists; and taught at Aspen, Juilliard, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.