Acclaim

December 19, 2025

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Jackiw amazed us at how beautifully his tone could sing in every range, tempo and dynamic… [he] spun a delightful aria with surprising turns of phrase over dreamy mists of arpeggios from the piano. Through the complexity and twists, each goaded the other to higher levels of passion. Jackiw’s tasteful portamento and impeccable accents impressed throughout... this twosome is a keeper.

Times of San Diego

This was a riveting performance. Wielding his 1704 Vincenzo Rugeri, first violinist Jackiw injected an electric urgency into his top-voice role.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Stephen Martorella

With flawless technique, Jackiw drove the outer movements forward, yet always commanded a bright, shining sound... with a ferocity and drive as to resemble a meteorite burning bright in the sky. The stunning conclusion elicited wild applause.

December 7, 2024

BachTrack

American violinist Stefan Jackiw impressed and surprised in equal measure: firstly, his use of open strings was very daring as was his absence of vibrato. However, he shaped the raw purity of this melody with exquisite lyricism. In an instant, this stillness was broken and he was bounding through the lively semiquavers with great nimbleness and soaring up to the longer, higher notes.

November 25, 2024

BachTrack

Jackiw purveyed a wholly different sound from his instrument in the central Canzonetta, interlaid with decorations from the winds. Following a sudden lapse into the blazing finale... ackiw offered a touching encore, teaming up with guest concertmaster Joel Link for the first movement of Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, a work the duo has performed together since their teenage years.

November 20, 2024

New York Classical Review

…Jackiw and Denk made everything clear, robust, and human. In this special space, with a small audience, this was as much séance as celebration, as beautiful in feeling as the music often is dense in sound.

November 4, 2024

The New Yorker

Distinguished violinists from Joseph Szigeti to Hilary Hahn have tackled the Fourth Sonata, yet Jackiw sets a new standard

Music City Review

Dennis A. Hawkins, Jr

Jackiw’s intonation was impeccable and matched by the flute-oboe-clarinet sections throughout some rather exposed moments... Stefan Jackiw’s technical abilities towards the end of the Concerto were hypnotic with precision, much like the way musicality oozed from his soul throughout the 2nd movement.

Vulture

Justin Davidson

The most vibrant music so often takes place at the point where cultures meet, eras overlap, sensibilities intersect, and traditions fork. That in-between space is also the habitat of the aptly named Junction Trio, three stupendous musicians who glory in artistic instability, the sense that styles are not pure or settled practices and never were.

November 29, 2023

Arizona Daily Star

Mei-Ann Chen to Cathalena E. Burch

Although I knew of him when he was a young prodigy... Stefan was very young and I had just come from Taiwan with very limited English. Over the past few decades I have followed Stefan’s blossoming career and I am so much looking forward to making music together for the first time.

October 20, 2023

Violinist

Jackiw has such incredible command of his instrument and the piece that there was never a moment of questioning whether he was up to the task. His body language seemed to say, "Sit back and I’ll take you on a wonderful journey and, trust me, I won’t let you miss a thing."

September 18, 2023

New York Classical Review

The playing was superb. The music demanded high energy, technical precision, control and the ability to be something like a fully loaded, churning cement mixer that can also stop and switch course in a nanosecond. Junction delivered all this in one of the finer Zorn chamber works one has heard.

Hyde Park Herald

Jackiw is an enchanting violinist with a gorgeous, singing tone and a natural gift for phrasing as delicate or robust as the music demands.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Jackiw’s sweetly singing natural artistry (already fully developed in his teens) and exquisite tones, matched handsomely with his frequent collaborator... Jackiw’s dipping his bow in a vernal pool with the tiniest of ripples…a cathedral of tone…godly restraint…chorale-like double-stops…Jackiw knew when to eschew the star’s throbbing tone for something simpler…

Chicago Classical Review

Stefan Jackiw’s extraordinary performance with the Grant Park Orchestra- the city kept mostly quiet Wednesday night and the Millennium Park audience was treated to a summer highlight... Jackiw’s understated, elegant presence allowed the gentle nuances of his playing and interpretation to speak for themselves…

Fox 5

Violinist Stefan Jackiw went viral last week when he carried on playing after his nearly two-century-old violin bow broke during a performance.

NPR

Ailsa Chang, Ari Shapiro, Megan Lim, Tinbete Ermyas

A violinist's bow snapped mid-performance at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

indy100

Sophie Thompson

Stefan Jackiw was performing with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and while those around him appeared shocked by what had happened, he simply got handed another one and carried on.

Upworthy

"... he was as cool as Fonzie sipping on a chocolate malt."

BBC Classical Music

Undaunted, Jackiw showed great composure, making a rapid bow swap with BSO violinist and orchestra leader Amyn Merchant and carrying on in less than five seconds.

BBC

A violinist who travelled from New York to perform in Dorset wowed the audience after he managed to continue his performance despite his £24,000 bow breaking unexpectedly.

Limelight Magazine

Snap! Violinist Stefan Jackiw has sportingly uploaded footage of the moment his $30,000 bow failed him.

ClassicFM

Sophia Alexandra Hall

Violinist Stefan Jackiw let only three seconds of silence passed as he regained his composure after the nightmarish bow break.

The Strad

A third of the way through the concerto... the violinist’s bow spontaneously comes apart at the tip.

Violinist

Violinist Stefan Jackiw appeared remarkably calm after his $30,000 Francois Nicolas Voirin bow broke during the UK premiere of Ukrainian composer Reinhold Gliere's Violin Concerto...

The Violin Channel

The Violin Channel

Recovering elegantly, the VC Artist turned to the concertmaster to trade bows and continued on.

The Times

Constance Kampfner

Stefan Jackiw has played with the same faithful bow in more than 1,000 concerts and practiced with it for tens of thousands of hours... So when the $30,000 bow snapped during a concerto, Jackiw was shocked.

The Telegraph

The virtuoso finger-twisting double scales and heroic octaves were madly demanding, as were the sudden turns to plaintive, fragile expressivity.

February 16, 2023

LA Times

Pianist Jeremy Denk... and violinist Stefan Jackiw performed select compositions for the students, leaving many in awe.

December 12, 2022

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

The conjoined players, individually virtuosic, elegant, poetic, bel canto, and fierce, came up to Celebrity Series expectations in every respect...

December 12, 2022

The Boston Globe

The cellist Jay Campbell played with a firm yet flexible tone, and violinist Stefan Jackiw was resourceful throughout and especially eloquent in the stormy climaxes of the Schumann.

December 11, 2022

The Arts Fuse

This young, superstar trio is capable of being as cool as it is fiery, and the performers’ strengths bring out the best in each other.

December 11, 2022

Boston Classical Review

Jonathan Blumhofer

… a wonderful showcase for the idiosyncratic Junction Trio, an ensemble that… knows neither stylistic nor musical boundaries.

December 2, 2022

The Rehearsal Studio

Stephen Smoliar

Encountering a “new generation” trio approach this music last night was... a real treat from beginning to end.

November 30, 2022

WGBH

James Bennett II

The young, New York-based musicians are no stranger to Celebrity Series Boston, but this is their first time together as an ensemble for the presenter.

November 27, 2022

Times Union

Jackiw, 37, says he doesn’t mind sharing the bill. “It’s a pleasure to play with two people who have made me grow so much as a musician, expanding my taste and also my thinking about rehearsing and interpreting great music. Being in a trio has been a dream of mine since my 20s.”

November 27, 2022

Seen & Heard International

To hear the Britten Violin Concerto it is an interesting treat, so thanks to Stefan Jackiw for undertaking this score with complete commitment... there aren't many violinists who communicate the way Jackiw does.

November 27, 2022

Bachtrack

...Britten's Violin Concerto made fierce technical demands easily surmounted by the violinist... Despite the work’s outward austerity, Jackiw did much to probe its lyrical core...

October 28, 2022

Strings Magazine

It wasn’t on the agenda of violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao when they gathered at Tao’s Manhattan apartment in late 2015 to read through Mendelssohn’s D minor piano trio. But out of this meetup grew the Junction Trio, and the label of classical music supergroup began to stick.

October 3, 2022

The Scotsman

The American violinist Stefan Jackiw had its full measure, his playing style calm and confident, yet packed with such powerful and perceptive musicality that every gesture, every paragraph was meaningful and emotive. Most of all, he had the intellectual stamina to sustain attention to the very final utterance.

August 31, 2022

Vulture

Justin Davidson

The trio formed by pianist and composer Conrad Tao, violinist Stefan Jackiw, and cellist Jay Campbell is a grouping of hyper-rarefied talents, but by performing with the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts, they join a long tradition of democratizing classical music.

The Boston Globe

… I’ve never heard a more accurate musical illustration of someone pulling a person they love out of the doldrums.

February 3, 2022

Letter V

Jackiw’s willingness to balance solo pyrotechnics with more collaborative interactions between the violin and orchestra, and his audible determination to let this music breathe, made this an unusually fleshed-out, fully realized interpretation of the Korngold concerto.

January 11, 2022

WBUR

…the BPO’s Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2, with the astounding Stefan Jackiw, made me thoroughly reevaluate a piece that never got to me before.

September 1, 2021

614

Melissa Braithwaite

"Up-and-coming superstar"

Seen and Heard International

Jackiw is a first-rate player and one looks forward to hearing him in a wide range of repertory to see how he applies his thoughtful skills.

The Aspen Times

...the trio was mesmerizing, a case study in concentration and unity.

The Aspen Times

It was a thoroughly satisfying performance, and the communication among the soloists was ebullient and joyful...the concerto flowed as smooth as the polished wood on Jackiw’s violin.

Seen and Heard International

Bernard Jacobson

Stefan Jackiw is a violinist of persuasive lyrical gifts and technical prowess.

Bachtrack

The music was generally restrained until a sudden outburst in the final moments, showing in no uncertain terms the trio’s thorough command of this daunting music.

January 9, 2021

The Dallas Morning News

Some soloists have the ability to grab your attention and never let go. Stefan Jackiw, an American violinist of Korean and Ukrainian heritage, is one of those musicians.

August 11, 2020

The Aspen Times

Jackiw’s silvery sound warmed to the melodic strands, making them easy to trace as they eventually coalesced into full statements of the tunes.

New York Classical Review

Though from different eras, the well-made program builds momentum with the linear accumulation of excitement as if the listener were there.

Grunion Gazette

Jackiw's performance had a gentleness and delicacy about it that I found enchanting.... in his hands [the Beethoven Violin Concerto] sounded fresh, new, and different, in a good way. His distinctive silvery tone weaved a spell.

February 28, 2020

Broadway World

Jackiw proved he could call on anything from disarming sweetness to considerable power. And he has technique to go with that emotional range. High notes were solid and accurate, trills rapid and precise, multiple stops clear and strong.

February 28, 2020

San Diego Reader

Concerning Stefan Jackiw, you will not find a more intelligent or engaged musician anywhere on the world stage.

February 13, 2020

The San Diego Union-Tribune

While Stefan Jackiw’s touring schedule may indicate he does nothing but music, the highly praised violinist has a multi-faceted life.

February 3, 2020

Bachtrack

"Jackiw seemed almost to have four hands as he dug deep to explore every facet, taking his listeners on a musical journey that was at once based on everything that had gone before, yet somehow sublimely different...It was an absolute triumph that brought the audience to their feet, after which Jackiw reciprocated with an immaculately played Bach encore."

January 24, 2020

San Francisco Chronicle

This is music that looks back to the father’s world while introducing all the strange innovations of the latter half of the 18th century, and Esfahani and Jackiw worked together to convey that duality in crisp relief.

January 24, 2020

San Francisco Chronicle

This is music that looks back to the father’s world while introducing all the strange innovations of the latter half of the 18th century, and Esfahani and Jackiw worked together to convey that duality in crisp relief.

January 13, 2020

Indy Week

To Jackiw, it’s as if Ives were walking down a busy city street, bombarded from all directions by sound, when he passes by someone wearing a particular scent. It triggers the vivid memory of a campsite from his childhood. Sometimes his memories are humorous and playful, sometimes wistful and longing, sometimes all of these at the same time. With each performance, Jackiw and Denk find another new articulation of a theme hiding somewhere unexpected.

November 26, 2019

The Arts Fuse

Jonathan Blumhofer

Jackiw played with a natural, effortless tone.... Sunday’s was a probing, touching reading, one that cast something very familiar in a new light.

September 2, 2019

Strings Magazine

Professionals String Players Describe Their Careers & How They Found Their Way to the Stage

Texas Classical Review

Jackiw uncovered the intense emotion of Bach’s gentle two-voiced counterpoint with flawless control and subtle passion.

January 29, 2019

Bournemouth Daily Echo

Music lovers were treated to a truly virtuoso performance of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto by the prodigiously-talented Stefan Jackiw on Wednesday night. Moving lightly on his feet, the young American talent seemed almost to hang off his instrument like a marionette, playing with precision and elegance but also a sharp-as-a-razor bite that captured the music's edge.

January 29, 2018

Boston Globe

Jackiw came more recently to Ives’s music, but you would never know it from his playing, marked in equal parts by confident self-possession and a rare sense of musical empathy. This pair should record this repertoire.

February 21, 2016

Chicago Classical Review

Violinist phenom Stefan Jackiw's...playing was musically astute from start to finish, delivered with a shimmering tone and flawless technique.

February 21, 2016

Chicago Classical Review

Violinist phenom Stefan Jackiw's...playing was musically astute from start to finish, delivered with a shimmering tone and flawless technique.

February 21, 2010

Los Angeles Times

[Jackiw] could be a rock star. And he tears into Tchaikovsky like a rock star might if a rock star could. Jackiw's was a fascinating, impressive and often riveting performance. Jackiw made each phrase an individual and excitable event. There can't be much doubt that Jackiw's star will continue to rise.

Classical Voice of North Carolina

Enter soloist Stefan Jackiw, whose playing exhibited a silvery, lyrical tone that carried throughout the hall with seemingly effortless control. Jackiw found subtleties and nuances galore, not allowing a single note to pass by unconsidered. His technical mastery was total.... This is clearly a violinist to watch in the coming years. His playing was on every level world class.

The Day

A beautiful, romantic piece that had Jackiw rising up on his toes as he tossed off the luscious violin melodies…. The phrasing throughout was impeccable and the romantic sweeps of emotion were played to the hilt as each player physically launched himself into the score, bending and swaying to the music.

New York Times

Anthony Tommasini

The brilliant young violinist Stefan Jackiw...deftly balancing fervor and elegance, beautiful tone and earthy colorings, proved [an] inspired Ivesian on this exciting night.

Portland Press-Herald

Jackiw, a young powerhouse violinist...can turn on a dime, moving from a beautifully burnished tone to a sound with a sharper, snappier edge, capturing Ives’ mercurial mood shifts in a thoroughly visceral way.

Philadelphia Inquirer

David Patrick Stearns

With his distinctive tone quality and profound use of color and articulation, Jackiw made perfect sense of Ives' hairpin turns, making them mean something beyond gleeful trickster-ism.

The Guardian

A performance of real integrity. His technical prowess was never in doubt, with his sure intonation and seamless negotiation of Mendelssohn’s transparent violin writing. The way Jackiw paced the bravura showpiece of the first movement’s cadenza illustrated his virtuoso technique and natural musicality.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Jackiw combines expressive elegance, tonal purity and spot-on intonation. He is a nimble musician who traverses the violin as if impediments didn't exist.

Financial Times

Not only was his technique serenely confident, but his tone pure and piercingly sweet,his harmonics bell-like, his phrasing pristine and faultless. With all the virtues mentioned, Jackiw further proved to be a lovely, innocent musician […] brilliantly skillful and selflessly musical.

The Strad

This American-born violinist gave a performance of the Mendelssohn E minor Violin Concerto that was truly sensational, showing a talent and maturity that belied his years.

Cincinnati Enquirer

Jackiw is without doubt a star of the future.

Philadelphia Inquirer

... the kind of triumph of personality you wanted to cheer... [Jackiw has] a sound so saturated and vibrant it sounded like a living thing.

The Globe and Mail

Stefan Jackiw has risen swiftly in the past decade to challenge the foremost talents of our day - Ehnes, Tezlaff, Kavakos, Hahn - by the quality of his insight and skill. He played Mozart like an angel. The result was about as pure and as close to perfection as music can get.

The Sunday Times [London]

[Jackiw] does not deliver a preconceived interpretation, glazed and showy, but seems to invent it as he goes along. His sound is intimately detailed and apparently delicate, yet easily fills the hall. His technique, of course, is masterful.

Boston Globe

Soloist and young phenom Stefan Jackiw got [the Beethoven Violin Concerto] right: The downbeats were alive and electric, a bloom on the tone or a subtle syncopated emphasis pushing the line forward. Jackiw’s technique is prodigious, his intonation precise, but his playing is striking for its intelligence and sensitivity.

Seattle Times

Jackiw made a sensational impression on Thursday evening, performing the Saint-Saens Violin Concerto No. 3 with Gerard Schwarz and the [Seattle Symphony]. The young player is a powerhouse of a violinist with a big rich tone and a lot of technical assurance. But he isn’t just a speedy-fingered prodigy. Jackiw made the most of his interpretive opportunities, especially in the second movement, with its lovely melodic line. Clad in a black shirt and black slacks, Jackiw played with exceptional clarity and maturity.

Seattle Times

Most impressive debut [of 2004]

Boston Globe

Such soaring beauty of tone, such strength and purity of feeling, that this hardened listener burst into tears.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Jackiw was astonishing. Get out the superlatives and take your pick: huge technical resources; dead center pitch, even at the highest register of the instrument; a tone both silky and steely; a bow arm of great strength and control; breathtaking clarity, even in the fastest passages; a myriad of colors and dynamic values. For someone so young, his talent is remarkably complete, his musicality strikingly mature. Like many young virtuosos, he likes fast tempos, and he took the final movement very quickly. But he made sense of the speed.

Boston Globe

One of the miracles and mysteries of music is how the exceptionally gifted young performer can renew the art by making you hear unexpected things in music you've known longer than they've been alive, by making you feel the music as freshly and intensely as you did when you were first discovering it. Violinist Stefan Jackiw can do this.

Washington Post

Talent That’s Off The Scale

Boston Globe

It took all of one phrase to realize we were in for a performance of uncommon musical substance.... it’s clear he has thought more deeply than many of his peers about an essential koan of interpretation: how to wed genuine devotion to a composer’s vision with playing of interior participation and personal freedom.

Washington Post

Listening to the apparently endless parade of expert, teenage violinists passing through our concert halls, you'd be hard-pressed to find one with a more consistently beautiful sound than 19-year-old Stefan Jackiw. His reading of Saint-Saens's Violin Concerto No. 3, with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Music Center at Strathmore on Thursday, was marked by elegance, a supple, singing line and a liquid tone that never hardened, even in the score's bravura passages. This was gorgeous playing – from the spot-on precision in the first movement's stratospheric high notes through the poise and nobility imbuing the swaggering finale.

Chicago Sun Times

It took all of one phrase to realize we were in for a performance of uncommon musical substance.... it’s clear he has thought more deeply than many of his peers about an essential koan of interpretation: how to wed genuine devotion to a composer’s vision with playing of interior participation and personal freedom.

Kansas City Star

It’s tough for a youngster to make a strong first impression with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, with countless versions by a century of great violinists ringing in our ears. But at Friday’s local debut by 20-year-old Stefan Jackiw, who is on tour with the Moscow State Symphony, it was obvious that we were in the presence of a magnificent new talent. [Jackiw’s] was some of the most debonair, impassioned, pitch-accurate and sophisticated violin playing I’ve heard in quite a while.

Chicago Tribune

[Stefan Jackiw] could be a legend in the making. He has everything he needs to make an exceptional career for himself – flawless technique, precocious musical understanding, and a sweet, singing tone.

Washington Post

Stefan Jackiw made a strong impression with the orchestra [Baltimore Symphony under Gunther Herbig] in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Op 14. The 21-year-old American violinist’s weeping tone and spot-on intonation made you wonder whether this was what it was like to hear a Perlman or a Stern in his early years. Jackiw’s playing was by turns passionate, precise, and unflagging.

Kansas City Star

You’d have to go back several generations to find a violinist to compare to Stefan Jackiw, because there’s almost no one today who is in his league. His recital brought to mind the great players of past eras, which is not to say that he sounds like Heifetz or Milstein but that he embraces the same honesty, purity, and directness. He makes music in a way that is wholly his own. If anyone was wondering whether Jackiw’s unspeakably beautiful Tchaikovsky Concerto here last season was a fluke, this recital exploded that idea. I’ve heard hundreds of violinists in my lifetime, and presently there is not one I would rather listen to than this Boston-born 22-year-old.

Boston Globe

Jackiw lives up to his promise in BSO [Boston Symphony] debut The Mendelssohn was remarkable for long and singing line, fabulous intonation, effortlessly sparkling virtuosity, and imaginative shaping of phrases and dynamics; Jackiw’s bow arm left violinists in the audience awe-struck and envious. One listens to him with gratitude because in his hands, familiar music once again becomes fresh and personal.

Baltimore Sun

Barely into his 20s, Jackiw plays with the incisiveness and exquisite taste of an Old World, long-seasoned fiddler.

Seattle Times

This is a young star of astonishing gifts, whose musicality and technical finesse place him at the top of his peers.

The Times [London]

Jackiw hit gold right from the violin’s opening bars, so even in tone, clean in articulation, the phrases forming one long line of glorious song. He felt every note deeply and wisely, never brushed away the orchestra, and never shouted ‘Me! Me! Me!’ The virtuoso displays were tossed off with awesome ease. Even more impressive though, was Jackiw’s simplicity and honesty. He knows how to feel, how to be simple and how to be quiet.