John Murray

John Creighton Murray

Sept. 10, 1921 - Oct. 6, 2014

The Last Link to Composers of Classical Music

John Creighton Murray, son of Kathleen Crowe and John Creighton Murray, was born in Long Island City, New York. He spent the last 35 years of his life in San Francisco. He began studying the violin at the age of three. Among his teachers were Toscha Seidel and Bronislaw Huberman. He studied the Tschaikowsky violin concerto with Philip Mittell who studied with Tschaikowsky himself. He studied the Brahms' violin concerto with the legendary Bronislow Huberman who studied with Brahms. Murray learned the Grieg sonata with Henry Burck, who performed it with Grieg. Burck was also Eugene Ysaye's assistant at the Brussels' Conservatory of Music in the 1890s.

He made his debut at Carnegie Hall at 17 in New York, receiving rave reviews. Throughout his distinguished career, he has played frequently in New York's Carnegie Hall, as well as in 125 other cities in the United States and toured extensively throughout Canada, Latin America and Europe.

He made triumphant appearances as soloist with 50 of the leading orchestras of the world including the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, The Grand Orchestre Symphonique of Brussels, the Florence Teatro Comunale Symphony, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional of Mexico, impressing most of the music critics and pleasing audiences.

He also developed a unique format for certain performances in which he presents great works with illustrative comments, rich in anecdote. Writing of these unique performances, author, commentator and fellow Bohemian Club member Lowell Thomas wrote: "This man is probably the world's foremost violinist. Also he is a great American, as fine a person as you've ever met – articulate and a first-rate story-teller."

He has developed innovations for the violin that extend the technical and interpretive possibilities of the instrument itself. Dean Wallace of the San Francisco Examiner newspaper wrote, "Murray is in the process of exploring the true potential of an instrument whose development ground to a halt around the time of Paganini. Murray is very likely to be remembered as the man who pulled the violin into the 20th Century."