Geoffrey Michaels

Geoffrey Michaels (born 1944 in Perth, Western Australia) is an Australian-born violinist and violist, a child prodigy in the 1950s, who now performs and teaches primarily in the United States.

Geoffrey Michaels began taking violin lessons at the age of five, and was soon recognized as a prodigy. At 14, he became the youngest performer ever to win the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s concerto competition, and made his first recording, which sold out within a few weeks of its release.

At the age of 16 he went to the United States to attend the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied violin with Efrem Zimbalist, and violin and viola with Oscar Shumsky. While still a student he became a member of the Curtis String Quartet. He then pursued a solo career, winning the fourth annual Emma Feldman Competition in Philadelphia, and placing among the finalists in the Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris, and the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels, and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where he played Zimbalist’s ‘Coq d’Or Fantasy.

He has been a professor at Florida State University and at the University of British Columbia. Michaels currently lives in the Philadelphia area.

Michaels is a sought after soloist and chamber music player. Notable contemporary concerto performances include the US premier of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso (broadcast on Voice of America), and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa for Two Violins and Strings and Fratres, both at Lincoln Center in New York.

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