— The New York Times
About
Over the past 40 years, the Shanghai Quartet has become one of the world’s foremost chamber ensembles. The Shanghai’s elegant style, impressive technique, and emotional breadth allows the group to move seamlessly between masterpieces of Western music, traditional Chinese folk music, and cutting-edge contemporary works. Formed at the Shanghai Conservatory in 1983, soon after the end of China’s harrowing Cultural Revolution, the group came to the United States to complete its studies; since then the members have been based in the U.S. while maintaining a robust touring schedule at leading chamber-music series throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Recent performance highlights include performances at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freer Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and the Festival Pablo Casals in France, and Beethoven cycles for the Brevard Music Center, the Beethoven Festival in Poland, and throughout China. The Quartet also frequently performs at Wigmore Hall, the Budapest Spring Festival, Suntory Hall, and has collaborations with the NCPA and Shanghai Symphony Orchestras. Upcoming highlights include the premiere of a new work by Marcos Balter for the Quartet and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo for the Phillips Collection, return performances for Maverick Concerts and the Taos School of Music, and engagements in Los Angeles, Syracuse, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City.
Among innumberable collaborations with eminent artists, they have performed with the Tokyo, Juilliard, and Guarneri Quartets; cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Lynn Harrell; pianists Menahem Pressler, Peter Serkin, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Yuja Wang; pipa virtuoso Wu Man; and the vocal ensemble Chanticleer. The Shanghai Quartet appears regularly at many of North America’s most prominent chamber-music festival, including annual performances for Maverick Concerts, the Brevard Music Center, and Music Mountain.
The Shanghai Quartet has a long history of championing new music, with a special interest in works that juxtapose the traditions of Eastern and Western music. The Quartet has commissioned works from an encyclopedic list of the most important composers of our time, including William Bolcom, Sebastian Currier, David Del Tredici, Tan Dun, Vivian Fung, Lowell Lieberman, Zhou Long, Marc Neikrug, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, and Du Yun. The Quartet had a particularly close relationship with Krzysztof Penderecki; they premiered his third quartet – Leaves From an Unwritten Diary – at the composer’s 75th birthday concert and repeated it again at both his 80th and 85th birthday celebrations. Forthcoming and recent commissions include new works from Judith Weir, Tan Dun, and Wang Lei, in addition to a new work from Penderecki.
The Shanghai Quartet has an extensive discography of more than thirty recordings, ranging from Schumann and Dvorak piano quintets with Rudolf Buchbinder to Zhou Long’s Poems from Tang for string quartet and orchestra with the Singapore Symphony. The Quartet has recorded the complete Beethoven string quartets and is currently recording the complete Bartók quartets.
A diverse array of media projects run the gamut from a cameo appearance playing Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in Woody Allen’s film Melinda and Melinda to PBS television’s Great Performances series. Violinist Weigang Li appeared in the documentary From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China, and the family of cellist Nicholas Tzavaras was the subject of the film Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep.
Serving as Quartet-in-Residence at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University since 2002, the Shanghai Quartet joined The Tianjin (China) Juilliard School in fall 2020 as resident faculty members. The Quartet also is the Ensemble-in-Residence with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and visiting guest professors of the Shanghai Conservatory and Central Conservatory in Beijing. They are proudly sponsored by Thomastik-Infeld Strings and BAM Cases.
Weigang Li, Violin ↓
Born into a family of well-known musicians in Shanghai, Weigang Li began studying the violin with his parents when he was 5 and went on to attend the Shanghai Conservatory Middle School at age 14. Three years later, in 1981, he was selected to go to study for one year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music through the first cultural exchange program between the sister cities of Shanghai and San Francisco. In 1985, upon graduating from the Shanghai Conservatory, Weigang Li left China to continue his studies at Northern Illinois University and later studied and taught at The Juilliard School. Besides his parents, other important teachers have included Shmuel Ashkenasi, Tan Shu-Chen, Robert Mann and Isadore Tinkleman.
Mr. Li was featured in the 1980 Oscar winning documentary film From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China. He made his solo debut at 17 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and has appeared as soloist with the Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony and Asian Youth Orchestra.
Weigang Li is a founding member and first violinist of the world-renowned Shanghai Quartet since 1983. Now in its 38th season, the Shanghai Quartet has performed nearly 3,000 concerts in 35 countries and recorded over 30 albums, including a highly acclaimed 7-disc set of complete Beethoven string quartets.
Weigang Li is currently a violin professor at The Tianjin Juilliard School, an Artist-in-Residence at Montclair State University in New Jersey and also a violin professor at Bard College Conservatory of Music. He also holds the title of guest concertmaster of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and guest professor at both the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
Angelo Xiang Yu, Violin ↓
Violinist Angelo Xiang Yu, recipient of both a 2019 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 2019 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, as well as First Prize in the 2010 Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition, has won consistent critical acclaim and enthusiastic audience response worldwide for his astonishing technique and exceptional musical maturity.
In North America, Mr. Yu recently appeared as a soloist with a number of major orchestras including the San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, Colorado, North Carolina, San Antonio, Puerto Rico, and Charlotte Symphonies, as well as the Rochester and Calgary Philharmonic among others. Internationally, he has appeared with the New Zealand Symphony, Shanghai Philharmonic, Auckland Philharmonia, Norwegian Radio Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra and the Oslo Philharmonic.
An active recitalist and chamber musician, he has performed in a number of world-renowned venues such as the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Louvre in Paris, National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Victoria Theater in Singapore, Shanghai Symphony Hall, Oslo Opera House, Auckland Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and Jordan Hall and Symphony Hall in Boston. In March 2017, Mr. Yu was chosen to be a member of the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two).
Mr. Yu is also a frequent guest at major summer music festivals including the Ravinia, Aspen, Grant Park, Chamber Music Northwest, as well as at the Verbier and Bergen Festivals in Europe. He also serves as artist faculty at Music @ Menlo and the Sarasota Music Festival.
Mr. Yu joined the faculty at the New England Conservatory Preparatory in 2015, and also serves as a guest faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the fall of 2020, he became the newest member of the Shanghai Quartet. He serves as an Artist-in-Residence at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University and as a resident faculty member at The Tianjin Juilliard School.
Born in Inner Mongolia China, Angelo Xiang Yu moved to Shanghai at the age of 11 and received his early training from violinist Qing Zheng at the Shanghai Conservatory. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master's degrees as well as the prestigious Artist Diploma at the New England Conservatory where he was a student of Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried, and served as Mr. Weilerstein’s teaching assistant.
Mr. Yu currently performs on the 1715 “Joachim” Stradivarius violin, generously on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.
Honggang Li, Viola ↓
Honggang Li is a founding member of the Shanghai Quartet, which is now in its 38th season and has performed nearly 3,000 concerts in 35 countries and recorded over 30 albums.
Mr. Li began studying the violin with his parents at age seven. When the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing reopened in 1977 after the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Li was selected to attend from a group of over five hundred applicants. Among his teachers were Li-Na Yu and Shmuel Ashkenasi.
He co-founded the Shanghai Quartet with his brother while studying at the Shanghai Conservatory. The ensemble soon became the first Chinese quartet to win a major international chamber music competition (the London International). Mr. Li received a master’s degree from North Illinois University and served as a teaching assistant at The Juilliard School in New York. In 1987, he won the special prize (a 1757 DeCable violin) given by Elisa Pegreffi of the Quartetto Italiano at the First Paolo Borciani International Quartet Competition in Italy.
Mr. Li started his teaching career at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 1984. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence and faculty member at the Montclair State University. He also is a resident faculty member at the recently opened Tianjin Juilliard School and viola professor at the Bard Conservatory. He has been a guest professor of both the Shanghai and Beijing’s Central Conservatory for the past two decades. Mr. Li has also been the guest principal violist of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra since 2009.
Nicholas Tzavaras, Cello ↓
A native of East Harlem in New York City, cellist Nicholas Tzavaras has toured the globe as a chamber musician, soloist and educator for over two decades. He has performed well over 1,600 concerts worldwide, from Carnegie Hall in New York to the Tonhalle in Zurich to Casals Hall in Tokyo. Since 2000, Mr. Tzavaras has been the cellist of the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet. Notable festival appearances have included the Brevard, La Jolla and Taos festivals; the Casals Festival in Prades, France; the Melbourne Music Festival in Australia and the Marlboro Festival. For the past 12 years, Mr. Tzavaras has held the esteemed title of guest principal cellist of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra since 2009. He has recorded more than 25 albums for the Naxos, Delos, BIS, Centaur, Camerata, and New Albion labels, including the complete quartet cycle of Beethoven and Bright Sheng’s songs for pipa and cello with Wu Man, to name a few.
Tzavaras began the violin at age 2 with his mother, the celebrated pedagogue Roberta Guaspari, and moved to the cello when he was 8. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he went on to receive degrees from the New England Conservatory and the State University of New York at Stony Brook where his cello teachers were Laurence Lesser and Timothy Eddy. Mr. Tzavaras can be seen in the Academy Award nominated documentary “Small Wonders,” the motion picture “Music of the Heart” and with the Shanghai Quartet in Woody Allen’s “Melinda Melinda.” Since 2002 Mr. Tzavaras has been Artist-in-Residence at Montclair State University’s John J. Cali School of Music. He is also a guest professor at the Shanghai and Central Conservatories of China and on the faculty of the Longy School of Music in Boston. In the fall of 2020, Tzavaras joined The Tianjin Juilliard School as resident faculty for cello and chamber music.
When not with his cello, Mr. Tzavaras considers himself to be an avid cyclist, occasional triathlete, backyard chicken farmer, enthusiastic but unfortunately average chess player, and, perhaps most importantly, loving father of three children all under the age of 13.