Vibha Janakiraman

VIOLINIST

Bio

20 year old Indian-American violinist Vibha Janakiraman is a musician whose artistic purpose lies at the crossroads of chamber music, pedagogy, cultural intersection, and a love for philosophy and mathematics. She is a student of Itzhak Perlman and Mark Steinberg at the Juilliard School, where she is a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship. Her music has taken her to the stages of venues at the White House, Kimmel Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Lincoln Center. Most recently, Vibha was named a 2023 Presidential Scholar in the Arts and a 2022 National YoungArts Gold Winner in Classical Music. She serves as concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra as a member of their Principal Strings pool. After making her orchestral debut at the age of 11, Vibha has since appeared as a soloist with various ensembles in the greater Philadelphia area, including the Philadelphia Young Artists Orchestra, the Ambler Symphony, the Newark Symphony Orchestra, and the Main Line Symphony Orchestra. Vibha is dedicated to bringing deeply impactful performances, presented with courage and patience, to her audiences.

A devoted chamber musician at heart, Vibha is working towards her dream of performing the full Beethoven String Quartet cycle. She has performed with numerous chamber groups at The Perlman Music Program, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and the Juilliard School, and has collaborated with Itzhak Perlman, Maxim Vengerov, and members of the Brentano and Emerson Quartets, amongst others. She recently made her Alice Tully Hall debut as part of the Neela String Quartet through Juilliard’s Honors chamber music program. Vibha will attend the Marlboro Music Festival beginning in their 2027 season.

Vibha appeared on NPR’s radio show “From the Top,” where she spoke of her cultural connection to South Indian Classical music and performed Reena Esmail's Darshan. Deeply inspired by her mentors, she is passionate about promoting holistic music education and is an avid teacher. In June 2024, Vibha served as Guest Artist at the C’est Bon Music Academy, where she taught and performed chamber music, and gave a presentation on South Indian Classical Music. Outside of the musical sphere, Vibha loves physics, math, philosophy, languages, and writing. She is the founder of the Narrative Resonance concert series, putting chamber music and literature in conversation through accessible events for local communities.

EF6AC6AB-5B4E-4E53-A23F-5CAF6105030B_edi

Coming Soon....

How might Virginia Woolf’s approach to narrative parallel German composer Robert Schumann’s use of form? What can Clarice Lispector’s abandoning of linear time reveal about French composer Maurice Ravel’s use of rhythmic, harmonic, and motivic material to restructure time? What do Mary Oliver's poems about letting go share in common with composers' final string quartets?

Narrative Resonance is a concert series of free lecture-performances in partnership with libraries, bookstores, art galleries, high schools in the greater NYC area. Each event pairs a work of classical music with a work of literature, putting them in conversation to explore the emergent parallels, illuminating the persisting truths they offer us in our modern world. Events are about 60 minutes in length, consisting of a presentation about the intersection of the two works, and culminating in a full performance of the musical work by Juilliard musicians. In the spirit of removing barriers to learning and artistic experience, no prior knowledge of classical music or the relevant literature is needed.

In today's fast-paced digital age, listening to live classical music and reading are both becoming increasingly infrequent practices in our lives, fading from the modern focus. In presenting performances of chamber music in tandem with discussions of literature through accessible in-person demonstrations, we hope to show people precisely how our engagement with these art forms strengthens and preserves our humanity. Metaphor and analogy are some of the most effective ways that we can observe this continuity of thought and emotion throughout the course of human history, and across divisions of genre. The most fascinating inquiry, and our most pertinent connections, happen in that moment of dialogue between multiple works of art.