10 best violinists in the world: the greatest of all time

In the hands of a great player, the violin is able to perform a role like no other instrument. It can find a natural home in any music genre, span the full breadth of musical expression, and channel virtuosity in the most jaw-dropping way. 

The ten individuals below definitely boast those hands. All of them are undisputedly great violin players, and together they represent arguably the best of the world’s achievements in violin performance. 

Each of them has left a unique mark on the global story of violin-playing. Some triggered revolutions in technique. Others are famed for their sheer brilliance of ability. Many would bring the music they played to ever wider audiences, while some are unrivalled specialists in particular repertoire.

Find out who’s who. 
 

The 10 best violinists of all time
 

1. Itzhak Perlman
2. Niccolò Paganini
3. Anne-Sophie Mutter
4. Stéphane Grappelli
5. George Bridgetower
6. Liz Carroll
7. Joseph Joachim
8. Papa John Creach
9. Kyung Wha Chung
10. Yehudi Menuhin

1. Itzhak Perlman

For over six decades, Itzhak Perlman has been fixed at the summit of violin-playing. All that time, he’s been interpreting, performing and recording the greatest music ever written for the instrument. And in the process, the Israeli-American has built an almost unrivalled reputation for himself.

The Perlman legend begins in 1958 when, at thirteen, he gave televised performances of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee on The Ed Sullivan Show. Within a decade, he was touring the US and Europe, recording the great works and collaborating with the likes of Jacqueline du Pré and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Although he’s a master of all trades, Perlman is closely associated with violin music of the Romantic era. He also has a notable taste for klezmer, a form of Jewish traditional music. And through the Perlman Music Program, he gives back to the community, encouraging youngsters to nurture their talent and passion for music, and be the best they can.

2. Niccolò Paganini

Arguably no one blew the violin’s horizons wide open to the same extent that Paganini did. As composer and player, he revolutionised his instrument, creating and performing music that exploited the violin’s possibilities in ways that previous musicians had only dreamed of.

Paganini hailed from Genoa. There he mastered the violin at a young age and caught the attention of patrons and impresarios alike. Performing extensively in northern Italy as a young man, he later toured Europe. And so he introduced his pioneering works to the world, popularising extended techniques such as harmonics and left-hand pizzicato.

Across the continent, audiences were stunned by Paganini’s skill and showmanship. His mastery of theme-and-variations form was their particular weakness - his ability to steadily sculpt a basic idea into the most complicated, overwhelming musical structure just blew them away. The stuff of legend. 

3. Anne-Sophie Mutter

Anne-Sophie Mutter is another violinist who stepped into the limelight at a very early age. In 1976, she performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 at the Lucerne Festival, at the age of just thirteen. Conducting her and the Berlin Philharmonic that day was one of the great conductors of all time, Herbert von Karajan, who championed this exciting young talent.

Before long, Mutter was performing around the world, cutting her way through the violin repertoire, and making a name for herself as one of finest players of her generation. As a player, she’s well known for her distinctive musical interpretations of the classics. Few players are able to leave their mark on a piece of music the way she does. 

Mutter’s conquered the canon, but she’s also revered for championing contemporary composers and their repertoire. Many leading 20th-century figures have written works specially for her, including film composer John Williams, Sebastian Currier and André Previn, who actually married Mutter in 2002.  

4. Stéphane Grappelli
 

The violin is likely to be one of the last things you think of when you hear ‘jazz instrument’. Unless you’re absolutely fixated on it, that is. Or if you’re familiar with Stéphane Grappelli. There’s no doubt that he occupies a unique place in the annals of violin-playing.

In 1934, the Parisian Grappelli and the guitarist Django Reinhardt formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The ensemble was one of the earliest string jazz bands, and it was in no small part responsible for giving jazz, until then America’s native music, a key foothold in Europe. 

Later collaborations with the likes of Duke Ellington and Paul Simon brought his playing to an even wider audience. Like Paganini over a century before, Grappelli pushed the violin’s boundaries. Not higher, necessarily, but outwards. In doing so he urged his listeners to reconsider everything they thought they knew about the most iconic classical instrument.

5. George Bridgetower
 

George Bridgetower’s legacy as a violinist centres on the events of 24 May 1803. That day he reached the pinnacle of his career when he premiered Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. It’s one of the most substantial, difficult and pioneering pieces of music written for the violin, and Bridgetower played it at first sight. That should give you a sense of his ability. 

Born in 1778 in Poland, to a West-Indian father and German mother, he was a prodigy, and was performing in London’s Drury Lane Theatre before he was ten. Soon after, he was playing for Thomas Jefferson in Paris. At twelve, George IV of England became his patron. And in early 1803, he performed in front of Beethoven, and left quite the impression.

The work that he was the first to play is now named after Rodolphe Kreutzer, the violinist that Beethoven re-dedicated his work to after falling out with Bridgetower. Kreutzer, who declared the composition unplayable, refused to perform it. If he was widely regarded as the greatest player in Europe, what does that make Bridgetower?

6. Liz Carroll
 

Although Liz Carroll isn’t from Ireland herself, she’s one of the finest ambassadors of its rich musical heritage. Since the late 1970s, she’s been breathing life into countless jigs, reels and hornpipes through her fiddle, with a level of technical flair and expressive control that’s rarely been matched by her contemporaries.

Trained in classical music at a Catholic school in Chicago, Carroll exposed herself to her beloved traditional music by attending gigs at the city’s Irish pubs. She learned the tunes and soon mastered the art of folk violin, heading east to Ireland in the 1970s to impress the folk community in a series of performance competitions. 

Her career, one of the most acclaimed in fiddle-playing, culminated in a 2010 nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Traditional World Music Album. Her exploits have helped to make her native city one of the world’s thriving centres of folk activity. Just like many emigrants before her, Carroll continues to deliver the joys of Irish culture to the world. 

7. Joseph Joachim

Joseph Joachim is perhaps the greatest player of the 19th century. In the era when classical music was becoming more accessible for many, this Hungarian embodied violin performance. He popularised many works, including Beethoven’s Violin Concerto as well as Bach’s sonatas and partitas, and the string quartet that he led was well renowned. 

Despite all this, he might be best known today for the personal and professional network of musical titans he put together. He was closely associated with both Robert and Clara Schumann, as well as Brahms. In one of the truly great premieres, Joachim actually debuted Brahms’ Violin Concerto, one of the finest in the repertoire.

His performing achievements tend to overshadow the fact that he was a composer in his own right. There are roughly 30 compositions to his name, including three celebrated concertos. He was also the co-composer of a series of educational publications entitled Violin School. Start playing the Joachim way with volume one. 

8. Papa John Creach

Of the players on this list, Papa John Creach could be the most versatile and boast the most impressive resumé. In the course of his career, he turned his hand to blues, jazz, classical and rock. He also worked with a diverse range of artists, including no less a figure than Charlie Daniels - another legend of the strings.

Creach’s training as a violinist was no less varied, developing his skill and paying his dues playing in cabaret bars and on ocean liners. His break came in 1970 when he fell in with the band Jefferson Airplane, joining that group as well as a side project of some of the members, Hot Tuna.  

The following year, his solo career took off via his self-titled debut album, and before long he was arguably the foremost violinist in the world of popular music. In fact, no one since has been able to carve out a niche in the market quite like Creach’s. He showed the world that there’s no genre that can’t be enriched by a violin. 

9. Kyung Wha Chung

Less than a year before Itzhak Perlman kick-started his career with a performance of the Mendelssohn concerto, nine-year-old Kyung Wha Chung was performing it with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1967 she won the Edgar Leventritt Competition, and offers to play great works with great musicians poured in straight away.

Chung’s repertoire is one of the broadest in the world, and she’s admired by many for her textbook interpretations of lesser-known works. Her 1989 recording of the Strauss and Respighi violin sonatas is a fine example of this aspect of her musicality. It earned her a Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Recording.

In 2005, an injury to her hand forced Chung to step back from performance. Taking up teaching at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School, she channelled her expertise into the hands of a younger generation of players. After a five-year hiatus, she returned to the professional stage to continue her remarkable career as a soloist.

10. Yehudi Menuhin

Active from the 1920s to the 1990s, Yehudi Menuhin seems the definitive 20th-century player. He played in Weimar-era Berlin, and for Allied forces during World War Two. He worked with sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar in the 1960s, championing Indian music. And he founded the Yehudi Menuhin School, overseeing education there until his death in 1999. 

He also happened to record three albums with Stéphane Grappelli in the 1970s. In short, Menuhin’s impact on the world of music was enormous. And on top of all that, he was a phenomenal player. At just twelve years of age, he performed the Bach, Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos in a single concert to a rapturous audience in Dresden. 

If you’ve read the guide to hardest violin pieces, you’ll know that Béla Bartók composed the Sonata for Solo Violin for Menuhin, which the violinist premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1944. If commissioning and premiering arguably the most difficult piece for violin ever written doesn’t justify his place on this page, it’s tough to think of something that would.

Your next steps for violin music

In truth, there are countless incredible players of the past and present, from Antonio Vivaldi, Pablo de Sarasate and Jascha Heifetz, to Hilary Hahn, Gil Shaham and Nicola Benedetti. It’s right to acknowledge the honourable mentions just as deserving of a ranking here as those who were chosen. 

What unites them all is their passion for music. Music in general of course, but the violin in particular. Throughout their amazing careers they were sustained by a hunger to discover, learn, practice and perform violin music. Discover that world of violin sheet music and let it encourage you in the same way.

Don’t feel like sifting through all of it to find the classics? This guide to the best violin songs does the work for you. The individuals here are the finest players - this guide tells you everything you need to know about the finest works.