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 the age of six.
After rejoining the faculty in the early 1950s, he remained for nearly fifty years, later being appointed to the Efrem Zimbalist Chair of Violin Studies, which position he held until his death in 1997.
Numbered among his students are Hilary Hahn, Joseph de Pasquale, Leila Josefowicz, Choong-Jin Chang, Juliette Kang, Judith Ingolfsson, Herbert Greenberg, Joey Corpus, Chin Kim, and Shira Katsman.
[3] In a 2019 investigation by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Canadian violinist Lara St. John and four other unnamed women accused Brodsky of sexually assaulting them when they were his students.
[4] 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.