Chad Hoopes: From Prodigy to “Artist”

CLEVELAND--Chad Hoopes was 13 when he won first prize in the Young Artists Division of the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition in 2007. He made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra the same year playing Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and he’s since performed with orchestras around the world. Until fairly recently, the phrase “child prodigy” described him perfectly.

Now, at age 19, Hoopes acknowledges that he is moving into another phase. “You have to transition into an artist,” he said recently over tea at a coffee shop in Cleveland’s Shaker Square. “I’m in the same category as the other big artists out there. I’m not a child anymore….That transition is difficult. You have a lot to prove.”

He already has. With a charismatic blend of poetic refinement and commanding virtuosity, he’s seized the ears of musicians, critics, and audiences. He’ll take a big step in November, when he makes his first recording, a pairing of the Mendelssohn and John Adams violin concertos, with the Leipzig Radio Orchestra and conductor Kristian Järvi for the French label Naïve Records. Hoopes signed a contract that calls for three discs, with an option for two more.

Soon after the recording, Hoopes will make his recital debut in Paris at the Louvre. His schedule for the coming season also includes concerts in Berlin, London, Munich, Toulouse, and Vancouver, all of which he will fit in among his studies, which start this month at the Kronberg Academy outside Frankfurt, Germany, where his teacher will be Ana Chumachenco, whose pupils include Arabella Steinbacher.

It was hearing Steinbacher play with the Cleveland Orchestra that convinced Hoopes that he had to study with Chumachenco. “I loved her playing,” he remembers. “She is so elegant, and she has a sense of clarity I don’t hear often.” Hoopes was so determined to work with Chumachenco that he never seriously considered going to college in the U.S. He has other reasons for leaving America as well, notably living and working in the same environment as the great composers. To develop into a complete artist, Hoopes feels the experience of living amid European culture and music is key. “It will make me more ready for the career I dream of,” he says.

He’s been preparing for it since he was a toddler, just after his family from Naples, FL, to Minneapolis, MI. There, sitting on his mother’s lap, he watched his two older sisters practice violin and decided he too wanted to play. At age three, at his sisters’ Suzuki recital, he walked up to the teacher, yanked on her skirt, and said, “When can I get my own violin?” He soon had a 1/32 size instrument.

Hoopes first played a concerto (Bruch No. 1) with an orchestra at age eight, and he grew to become enchanted with playing before an audience. “I love that feeling I have when I’m on the stage. I have such passion for the music. I have a connection with it. It comes down to being able to collaborate with orchestra members and being able to create something. When you play a great string quartet or sextet, it’s the same feeling.”

The Hoopes family moved to the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights when Chad was 12 to enable him and his sisters to enter the Young Artist Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He studied with its president at the time, David Cerone, and, when Cerone retired, with his successor, Joel Smirnoff.

(Hoopes’s sisters fared well after Cleveland: Anna, 22, a violinist, is a recent graduate of the Juilliard School; Alexandra, 21, a violist, is in her fourth year there.)

Soon after graduating last June from University School in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, Hoopes played concerts in Paris, Moscow, and Frankfurt before heading to the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. There, he spent three weeks immersing himself in chamber music and taking part in master classes. One experience he describes as “life-changing” was working with Ivry Gitlis, the 91-year-old Israeli-born violinist, and sharing musical ideas on their respective Stradivarius instruments, both made in 1713. Hoopes’s Strad, called the “Cooper,” was made available to him in 2009 as a long-term loan from Jonathan Moulds, a London banker whose collection of old violins is vast.

The “Cooper,” among the rare Strads and Guarneris owned by Moulds that Hoopes tested out, is the instrument he will use next month when he records the Mendelssohn and Adams concertos. The idea to tackle the Adams came from Hoopes’s manager at IMG Artists, Tanja Dorn, whom the violinist praises for guiding him through the early years of his burgeoning career. When he first looked at the concerto, he thought he could never play it. “It’s too hard, too big a piece to record,” he remembers telling Dorn. Now he believes it’s his mission as a young American violinist to be an advocate for the work. “I’m doing something unique,” he said. “I’m not playing something that’s been played by everybody with every orchestra. It means a lot to me. It’s been a real learning experience.”