Jonathan Brown

Born in Chicago in 1974, Jonathan Brown began his musical studies at the age of four and later started playing the viola in various chamber music ensembles. He studied with Heidi Castleman, Martha Strongin Katz and Victoria Chiang, before completing his Advanced Diploma at the Juilliard School in New York with Karen Tuttle. Jonathan Brown continued his studies at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg with Thomas Riebl and Veronika Hagen. He has taken part in masterclasses with Diemut Poppen, Sylvia Rosenberg and Donald Weilerstein, and was profoundly influenced by Ferenc Rados and György Kurtág.
Between 2002 and 2024, he was a member of the Casals Quartet, with which he performs in the world’s leading concert halls. The quartet records exclusively for Harmonia Mundi, a label with which it has released an extensive range of repertoire, from Boccherini to Kurtág.
In addition, Jonathan Brown has been invited by other chamber ensembles, such as the Tokyo, Kuss, Zemlinsky, Quiroga and Miró quartets, and the Kandinsky Trio. As a performer committed to contemporary music, Jonathan is a founding member of Funktion and has often performed as a soloist with BCN216, interpreting works by Morton Feldman and Luciano Berio.
He is currently Professor of Chamber Music at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles and previously taught viola and chamber music at ESMUC in Barcelona and the Reina Sofía School in Madrid. He has given masterclasses in cities such as Cologne, London, Aix-en-Provence, The Hague, Weikersheim, Fiesole, Linz, Lübeck, Essen, Rotterdam, Cleveland and Chicago, among many others. Originally from Chicago, Jonathan’s principal viola teachers were Martha Strongin Katz, Karen Tuttle, Heidi Castleman, Thomas Riebl and Veronika Hagen, and he was profoundly influenced by Ferenc Rados and György Kurtág.