Internationally Acclaimed Violinist Presents Concert and Master Class

He will return to campus the next day to teach a Noyce Master Class from 3–­6 p.m. Tuesday, April 3 in Lawson Lecture Hall, Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, Room 152.

Jennings has achieved international acclaim as both a performer and a teacher. As a soloist and chamber musician he has appeared in virtually every state and province in the US and Canada as well as most of the major cities of Europe. Recordings he is on have twice received Grammy recognition. His television appearances both here and abroad have also received numerous awards, including an Emmy. And his chamber music career includes tenure with the acclaimed Concord String Quartet as well as the Gabrielli Trio and the Concord Trio.

As a leading exponent of new music, Jennings has given nearly three-hundred premiere performances as well as acclaimed surveys of the complete chamber and duo works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Ives, Brahms, Rochberg, Bartok, and others. He has had long-term appointments as artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College and twenty-five years as professor at the Oberlin College Conservatory. His students have won important international competitions such as Naumburg and Fischoff and hold positions in orchestras, string quartets, and universities throughout this country and abroad including two winners of the Avery Fisher Prize.

Jennings is professor of violin and chamber music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is on the artist faculty of the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts where for the past thirty years he has held the Richard Burgin Master Teacher Chair.  A PBS documentary/portrait on the integration of a Western string quartet and a trio of indigenous Ecuadoran musicians, Musica Mestiza is currently airing throughout the country and has been nominated for an Emmy. 

The Donald S. Noyce ’44 Master Class Project Endowed Fund

The Donald S. Noyce ’44 Master Class Project Endowed Fund has been established by Bettie Neville Noyce ‘46 and other family members and friends in honor of Donald Noyce, who died in 2004. Noyce, a professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, began to learn the cello at age 47. He derived great pleasure in playing the cello and in performing for small groups with his wife Bettie, who played the violin. The endowed fund is intended to offer annual master classes in a stringed instrument to provide Grinnell College students the opportunity to improve their musical skill. Whenever possible, a public concert will also be held in conjunction with the master class.