Zhi-Jong Wang

Violin Soloist

“A Most Accomplished And Talented Young Colleague.”

Yehudi Menuhin

Zhi-Jong’s recent accomplishments include her debut recital at the Lucerne Festival, highly acclaimed performances with the Osaka Century Orchestra and with the NHK Symphony Orchestra under Tadaaki Otaka, and her debut at the Philharmonie Berlin.

As well as performing the standard violin repertoire, Zhi-Jong is a passionate exponent of contemporary music, performing works by Gubaidulina, Lutoslawski, Schnittke, Ligeti, etc. In the recent seasons, she premiered Ana Sokolovic’s Commedia dell’arte III and Nikolai Badinski’s Violin Concerto No.2.

Following her first concert leading the orchestra from the violin with Ensemble Orchestral de Paris performing Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 5 at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, ‘playconducting’ has attracted Zhi-Jong’s interest and in recent seasons she has played/conducted Vivaldi/Piazzolla’s Four Seasons and several of the Mozart concerti.

Zhi-Jong is the laureate of many important competitions beginning with First Prize in the 1998 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition. In the same year, she also won the First Prize of the China National Violin Competition, where she was the youngest first prize winner ever. In the following years Zhi-Jong Wang has distinguished herself receiving prizes in the Sibelius Violin Competition, Lipizer Violin Competition, Tchaikovsky Competition, etc. Her achievements have attracted world-wide attention, in 2006 the China edition of Gramophone magazine featured her in a full-page report, and musical critics acclaimed her as “a rare new star in Asia”.

Zhi-Jong has studied at Shanghai Conservatory of Music with the renowned Chinese violinist Professor Lina Yu. Afterwards, she studied with Kolja Blacher at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin, where she also worked as Professor Blacher’s assistant.

Zhi-Jong is currently Professor and Deputy Director of the Orchestra Department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. She plays on a 1716 Stradivarius kindly on loan from China Foundation.