Wynton Marsalis might be best known as a superstar jazz trumpeter and composer, but he has also enjoyed considerable success creating works that blend that rich sound world with classical music, another genre he knows well.
But few of these cross-genre ventures have found greater immediate popularity than his Violin Concerto in D, which was written for famed Scottish soloist Nicola Benedetti and premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra and her in 2015.
An international consortium of six organizations and ensembles commissioned the work, including the Ravinia Festival, but it has since been picked up by a host of others, including the Toronto Symphony and Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
The latest to join this crowd is the Grant Park Music Festival. Guest conductor Ludovic Morlot will team with violinist Tai Murray and the Grant Park Orchestra for concerts July 7 and 8 that feature the concerto along with works by Mozart, Fauré and Poulenc.
“I think it’s just an incredible piece,” said Murray who performed it previously this season with the Sacramento, California, and Rochester New York, philharmonics.
“It’s one of my favorites. It is quite a fun experience for me to feel the energy of the audience and just realize their awe at how they are being taken on this journey for 50 minutes.”
Murray has appeared nationally and internationally with such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestra in London and presented recitals in such major musical centers as New York, Paris and Berlin, where she has one of her two residences.
In 2012, she received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence from the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit-based organization that promotes the participation of people of color in classical music through competitions and educational initiatives.
The 41-year-old violinist was born in Chicago and moved with her family to Bloomington, Ind., when she 8 years old. A year later, she made her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing a concerto with then-assistant conductor Michael Morgan.
Murray doesn’t recall the request, but family members have told her that she asked for a violin and began lessons shortly before her fifth birthday.
“So, it was specific, so I must have heard or seen someone play the violin,” she said. “And as far back as I can remember, it has just been a part of my life.”
She went on to attend the well-regarded Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in the town where she spent much of her childhood and subsequently New York’s famed Juilliard School, receiving artist diplomas from both.
Early boosts to her career included a 2004 Avery Fisher Career Grant and her selection as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist in 2008-2010, a British program that brings valuable recognition to promising young musical talents.
In 2012, the same year she moved to Berlin, she recorded the Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, Op. 27 (1923), by famed Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe on the prestigious label, Harmonia Mundi. “I love the Ysaÿe sonatas very much, and it was a great gift to be able to do them,” she said.
After presenting scattered masterclasses and lessons previously, Murray joined the music faculty at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., in 2021.
“When the job became available at Yale,” she said, “I just thought, ‘This feels like the right time to do it.’ And, fortunately, it was. It’s going very well so far. I just finished by second year, and I’m very happy with my students.”
When she is not in the studio teaching, the violinist can usually be found on the road performing, as she will be when she makes her Grant Park festival debut.
Marsalis’ Violin Concerto mixes jazz and classical idioms, with the composer also paying respect to Benedetti’s Scottish ancestry by researching some of the historic ties between Anglo-Celtic and African-American music.
According to his notes for the work’s 2019 Decca recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he conceived the concerto as a kind of imaginary voyage for the soloist to the “four corners of the earth,” each represented by a different jazz-inflected movement — “Rhapsody,” “Rondo Burlesque,” “Blues” and “Hootenanny.”
“It’s just astounding, the [musical] colors and the styles and what he requires of me as a soloist and the orchestra as a whole,” Murray said. “So, it is quite a satisfying piece to perform.”
