Jascha Brodsky

Jascha Brodsky (June 6, 1907 – March 3, 1997) was a Russian-American violinist and teacher. He spent most of his career on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and co-founded the New School of Music, Philadelphia.

Biography Born in Kharkiv, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire (in present-day Ukraine), he began his violin studies with his violinist father at age six. He later studied at the conservatory in Tbilisi, Georgia, and by 1926, was performing all over the Soviet Union. That same year, he went to Paris to study with Lucien Capet. There he also played for Sergei Prokofiev (Violin Concerto No. 1) Soon thereafter, he moved to Belgium to study with Eugène Ysaÿe.

In November 2019, Curtis hired the firm Cozen O'Connor to conduct another independent investigation into St. John's accusations, as well as other potential incidents of sexual assault and abuse, promising to make the full report available to the public. On September 22, 2020, Curtis released the report, in which the attorneys who prepared it—Gina Maisto Smith and Leslie Gomez, former child abuse and sex crimes prosecutors—concluded that Brodsky had in fact sexually abused and raped St. John during the 1985–86 school year, when she was 14 and 15 years old. Smith and Gomez further concluded that Curtis had fallen "short in its institutional response" at several points when St. John informed the school of what Brodsky had done. The school issued an apology, and committed to new policies and actions to prevent future sexual abuse and make reporting easier for survivors.