August 12

With a side of socks:

Andrew Sords

Delaware native Andrew Sords (b. 1985) is a concert violinist whose performance track record belies his age. Andrew has already appeared as soloist with more than 100 orchestras and has performed on noted recital series across the U.S., Europe, Australia, Korea, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America.

He is a featured soloist on every track of New Age composer Sean Christopher’s latest album, “Transcendence” (2013, CD and MP3 formats).





Andromeda (violinist Andrew Sords):




But Andrew’s bread and butter lies with the performance of classical music repertoire. He is also an openly gay man. Based in Cleveland, Mr. Sords has performed with the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra (the first GLBT orchestra in America, founded more than 20 years ago)  and another GLBT ensemble, the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra (founded in 2004). On June 28, 2014, Sords will perform the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the Atlanta Philharmonic as part of the Atlanta Pride celebration, so we'll have a gay violinist soloing with a gay orchestra performing a concerto by a gay composer (Tchaikovsky) at a gay festival. Awesome.

Notably, Andrew has been profiled in “Lavender Magazine” (Minnesota’s GLBT biweekly) and Pittsburgh’s “Out”, a GLBT monthly tabloid publication. However, Sords is known to a much wider audience through mainstream venues such as NPR’s Morning Edition and Sirius XM Radio.

Sords performs on a Belgian violin built by Augustine Talisse in 1912, with strings exclusively provided by Warchal, Inc. (Slovakia). Andrew plays with a nineteenth-century French bow from the workshop of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.

In January Sords will headline the 2014 Moscow Mozart Festival with concerti and chamber music performances, immediately followed by a return engagement with the Pro Musica Chamber Series of San Miguel, Mexico. When I conducted a telephone interview with Mr. Sords for this blog post, he had just returned from Fairbanks Alaska, where he was a featured performer in the city’s Summer Arts Festival. So successful is his career that these days he is booked for approximately two years in advance.

Mr. Sords was the featured violinist in a documentary on violin technique. He was honored by Pulitzer Prize nominated composer Kellach Waddle, who dedicated his violin sonata to the young violinist. In 2006 Andrew commissioned a violin concerto from composer Evan Fein and recorded it with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra.

Strongly committed to extending classical music to everyone, Andrew dedicates a portion of his time at almost every engagement to educational outreach, master classes and community programming.

Andrew Sords is represented by EMC Artists, Ltd., and you can learn much more about him (and even read his tantalizing blog) at:

www.andrewsords.com