By Thomas May | From the July/August 2026 issue of Strings
“It’s a particularly empty thing to chase after what you feel you’re expected to want to do,” says James Ehnes. At 50, he can afford not to. Early in a career, momentum tends to decide everything: Opportunities are taken as they come, horizons expand, and the question of what one should want can seem like a luxury. But for Ehnes, the demands of building an international career no longer dictate the terms. The point now is not to keep accepting the work a successful violinist is expected to want but to choose projects for reasons that feel genuinely his own.
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“One of the things that’s tricky when you start in this industry is understanding what success actually is,” he says. “Is that artistic success, professional success? Any performing musician needs a significant amount of ambition.”
Ambition fuels the ascent, but over time it can turn outward into comparison and inward into dissatisfaction. “You’re always looking at what other people are doing: What should I be doing? Is that person doing more than me? Those things are silly at best and really poisonous in reality,” he says.
Rather than rejecting ambition, Ehnes has come to redefine it. “I’ve felt for a while—and feel more and more—that the best answer to that is control. When you start out, if someone tells you they’ll give you money to play your instrument, you jump at those opportunities. But as things evolve, you begin to create opportunities for yourself.”
Success for him now lies in something simpler, more private: “To be able to look at my calendar and see a reason that I’m excited for everything that’s on it—even if it’s a reason that only I know.”
Ehnes is speaking from a hotel room in Ohio, where he has just arrived to perform Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra—one of many return engagements built on longstanding relationships at the center of his work. But being able to rely on those bonds brings no sense of entitlement, no permission to relax standards. Quite the opposite: each appearance has to justify itself. “I’m only worthy of as much respect as my last performance deserved,” he says, articulating a kind of artistic credo. “A certain insecurity is even healthy.” Ehnes recalls a line often attributed to Joe DiMaggio: “Every game, there’s some kid out there who’s never seen me play before.”
Celebrating a Milestone
Ehnes has built his 50th-birthday season around the places and projects that matter most to him, with a cross-Canada recital tour at its center—26 concerts spanning every province and territory of the country where he was born and raised. “Including the territories, the parts of Canada that are sometimes neglected, was really important to me,” he adds.
The program itself, which he recently presented to his Seattle audience, amounts to a kind of artistic autobiography, shared with pianist Andrew Armstrong, one of Ehnes’s closest and most enduring artistic partners. In spoken commentary from the stage, Ehnes mixed reflection with self-deprecating humor, joking about taking “a midlife-crisis tour” as he traced how the larger works mark decisive points in his formation: Christian Sinding’s Suite in the Old Style, introduced to him at age eight by his beloved teacher Francis Chaplin through Heifetz’s advocacy of the piece; Brahms’ Third Violin Sonata, the first violin sonata he played and his gateway into a composer’s work whose music has remained central to his career; and Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 1, tied in memory to his first tour and to the realization that this was the career path he wanted to follow.
A new commission, Imaginal, by Carmen Braden, a genre-crossing composer from the Canadian sub-Arctic, extends the autobiographical frame into the present. The piece takes inspiration from the cells that carry the blueprint for a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly—a metaphor that gives the program’s backward glance its forward motion. Ehnes also rounds out the program with the kind of brilliant violin-piano miniatures he thinks today’s violinists would do well to revisit: salon pieces and virtuoso character works by Wieniawski, Moszkowski, Bazzini, and others that once circulated widely but now rarely appear on recital programs.
Earlier this year, Ehnes returned to the UK—“a market that’s been incredibly special to me over the years”—for a Wigmore Hall recital and other appearances, and a trip to Australia and New Zealand is also on the agenda. “I feel grateful to have established these relationships in places all over the world where people will come to hear me play,” he says.
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That sense of continuity is not accidental. It traces back to a musical upbringing that was grounded rather than accelerated. Ehnes grew up in Brandon, a small city in southwestern Manitoba, where his father, Alan Ehnes, taught trumpet at the local university. Music was part of daily life, but not in the sense of a fast-tracked career. Alan’s patient dedication to his students and musical values left a lasting mark.
Ehnes has more recently taken on a teaching role himself, joining the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in 2024, where he works with a small studio of students. He often points to his father’s example as a model—one that has influenced not only how he approaches teaching, but how he thinks about the broader responsibilities of a musical life. Those priorities continue to inform the way he builds his work: through durable artistic communities and settings in which music can deepen gradually.
An Artistic Home
Nowhere has that approach taken deeper root than in Seattle. At the Seattle Chamber Music Society (SCMS), it has been central to his work since he first performed there in 1995, not yet out of his teens. He was named artistic director in 2012, taking over that role from former New York Philharmonic cellist Toby Saks, who had founded SCMS in the 1980s.
“I do consider Seattle to be my artistic home,” Ehnes says. Though he spends much of the year traveling and has long had a home on Florida’s Gulf Coast—where his wife, Kate Ehnes, was a dancer with the Sarasota Ballet—he has more recently established a residence in Seattle as well, cementing an artistic connection that dates back to his first SCMS appearances.
The Seattle connection itself began, as he tells it, almost casually: a seemingly random phone call in his hotel room in Vancouver. On the line was Toby Saks, calling to invite Ehnes to perform some concerts at the summer festival in Seattle. “That phone call could have come from anywhere,” he says, “but all of these things make it feel like Seattle somehow was the place I was always kind of meant to be.”
In the years since, Ehnes has helped steer SCMS toward a more continuous way of working, with artistic partnerships unfolding across seasons instead of being confined to a single part of the year. Through the festival, he has formed close bonds with fellow musicians and patrons—among them David Fulton, a former Microsoft entrepreneur and collector whose Bellevue home became a destination and informal salon for players passing through Seattle. Fulton intended his extensive collection of Cremonese master instruments—much of it later dispersed—to be played, not locked away. It was through that philosophy that Ehnes came to acquire the 1715 “Marsick” Stradivari, whose quick response and focused, luminous tone have become inseparable from his musical voice.
For John Holloway, chief executive officer of SCMS, the alignment between Ehnes and Seattle is as much about what he gives the city as what it has given him. “James is one of the great musicians of his generation, and he plays with every major orchestra in the world,” he says. “The fact that he dedicates so much time to chamber music makes the presence of this art form larger.”
One thing that sets Ehnes apart, according to Holloway, is his instinct to understand how the music is experienced from the other side of the stage. When he travels with the violinist and hears him play a concerto in the first half of a program, he notes how Ehnes will often return to the hall after intermission to sit among the audience and listen to the second half. “He wants to hear it from their perspective,” Holloway says. “He puts himself in their seat.”
The commitment Holloway describes has affected every aspect of how the organization works. Guest artists appear at multiple points in the season, and activity extends beyond the traditional monthlong summer festival and winter weekends. A young resident ensemble, the Balourdet Quartet, was introduced last year with projects designed to connect across generations—including a residency that placed the group in an assisted-living community. SCMS has also launched its own recording label, focused on core chamber repertoire and drawing on performances developed through sustained artistic partnership. It debuted in June with a set of Brahms violin sonatas performed by Ehnes and pianist Andrew Armstrong.
Together, these initiatives point toward a year-round model that has moved well beyond the seasonal festival on which SCMS was founded. Instead of simply following a broader shift among chamber music organizations, SCMS has become one of the places where that shift is being actively tested: moving away from concentrated bursts of programming and toward a more continuous presence in the musical life of its community. Part of what makes SCMS unusual, Ehnes says, is its responsiveness. “When I get an idea to do something, it can just happen,” he says. “There are not too many places where this could be possible.” It’s a sense of freedom of scope, he adds, that comes with “a great feeling of responsibility.”
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One Musical Organism
If Seattle is his artistic home, does that place chamber music at the center of his work? How do the other strands of his career fit together? “I don’t think of them as separate,” Ehnes responds. “The lines between the ways I’m making music week to week are much blurrier than they might at first seem.” Seattle has provided “the perfect laboratory for my musical evolution in all facets,” he says, citing his many appearances with the Seattle Symphony as part of the same artistic ecology. Across repertoire and context, he hears a single thread. Playing Beethoven quartets or concertos by Bartók or Elgar is “all part of the same organism. The work I do as a concerto soloist makes me a better chamber musician, and the work I do as a chamber musician makes me a better soloist.”
He is also alert to a danger that can come with success: the narrowing of repertoire. Around his age, Ehnes says, “the breadth of the repertoire of an instrumental soloist starts to atrophy,” something he wants to resist by embracing new works, unfamiliar scores, and the constant repertory churn of SCMS.
Ehnes’s sense of belonging is reflected in the atmosphere of SCMS itself, where musicians return year after year to work together. That atmosphere owes much to his extensive network, which attracts players from the highest levels of the profession—Berliner Philharmoniker concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley, former Dover Quartet violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, and cellist Ani Aznavoorian, to name a few—alongside a circle of collaborators developed over decades.
One of these is fellow violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti, who has known Ehnes since they were teenagers at the Meadowmount School of Music in upstate New York. Their paths diverged and reconnected over the years, but the musical connection has endured—most visibly in the James Ehnes Quartet, formally established in 2010 and currently including Moretti, Che-Yen Chen on viola, and Edward Arron on cello, though they had played together long before then.
“We have a similar desire to bring the music to life in a way that honors the composer, and to share that in the best way with the audience,” says Moretti. “I think that’s why the four of us work so well together.” The quartet is currently in the midst of a three-year traversal of the Beethoven quartets at UCLA—a project that reflects the group’s commitment to living with core repertoire rather than treating it as a series of isolated performances.
In rehearsal, that shared outlook takes on a practical form. “James absolutely values everyone’s opinion, but of course has his own strong opinions,” she says. “There’s a real ebb and flow. You don’t always agree on everything musically, but we have deep respect for each other. James guides the music making, but it really is a shared vision.”
What has remained striking, Moretti says, is how little Ehnes has changed. His virtuosity follows the same principle—never showy but grounded in complete, “effortless” command of the instrument. “That’s not to say that his playing lacks personality, because I think that there is something deeply personal about the way that James plays. But we’re all trying to do our best to bring to life the notes and the message that the composer has given to us.” Offstage, she adds, the same qualities persist. He remains “completely down to earth,” open to others’ ideas, and still intent on refining his playing—a restlessness that has not diminished with success.
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That way of working—collaborative, responsive, and grounded in the music itself—points to what chamber music offers him more broadly at this stage of his career. Its scale allows for a degree of responsiveness that larger institutions do not make so readily available. “It’s an art form that can be very mobile, very nimble,” he says. “Even though a huge part of my career is working with orchestras, symphonic music involves much larger vessels to steer.”
At the Heart of It
The scale shifts in chamber settings—along with the emphasis. “More than in any other genre, it benefits from a certain humility—to put the music first and foremost,” as Ehnes puts it. “You might have some famous musicians playing it, but a great performance is one that features the piece itself as the center.”
When so many presenters offer performances of familiar repertoire, what is there to be found, as a listener, in the same pieces they’ve heard before? For Ehnes, the answer lies in how they are realized. “Not all performances are created equal,” he says. The same sense of responsibility that governs his playing carries over into his role as an artistic leader. “It falls upon an organization like ours in Seattle to present very high-quality performances,” Ehnes points out. “We’ve established a trust with our audiences that it’s going to be on a certain level.”
He likes to quote a line from his colleague John Holloway: “I think everybody loves chamber music—some people just don’t know it yet.” The task, then, is not only to perform but to shape how audiences encounter the music. “We’re in a position to curate these wonderful performances,” Ehnes says. “I would love for SCMS to be a beacon for people to feel confident that what they hear will be meaningful, put together with care and with love and attention.”
Across a career that moves fluidly between concerto appearances, chamber music, teaching, touring, and new initiatives—from digital projects to residencies—Ehnes refuses to treat these activities as silos. What ties it all together, he says, is simple. “The desire to get to what the heart of music is—and that, to me, is storytelling and communication. I want to be able to sleep at night feeling like I’ve treated that with respect,” he says.
There is also, increasingly, something else as well. “When I’m performing now, I feel a real gratitude to the audience for letting me into their little world, wherever that may be.” It is, he adds, both a burden and a privilege. “How lucky are we to be in this industry that reflects the highest parts of human nature? It’s a big responsibility—but it’s a big honor.”
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