Cho-Liang Lin

Violinist Cho-Liang Lin, is lauded the world over for the eloquence of his playing and for the superb musicianship that marks his performances. In a concert career spanning the globe for thirty years, he is equally at home with orchestra, in recital, playing chamber music, as in a teaching studio.

Mr. Lin’s recent and upcoming concerts reflect his wide-ranging musical activities. Performing on several continents, he appears as soloist with orchestras such as Dallas Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Houston Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and overseas with the Bergen Philharmonic, Stockholm Philharmonic, New Zealand Symphony, English Chamber Orchestra and Singapore Symphony. An avid chamber musician, the 2009/10 season includes chamber concerts at the Beijing Music Festival, as well as his perennial appearances performing at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. As an advocate for music or our time Mr. Lin has enjoyed collaborations and premieres with composers such as Joel Hoffman, John Harbison, Christopher Rouse,, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paul Schoenfield, Bright Sheng, and Joan Tower. Most recently, Mr. Lin presented the European and American premieres of Tangos Concertantes, a concerto by Hollywood icon, Lalo Schifrin. In the 2009/10 season, he will give the world premiere of Tan Dun's Violin Concerto as a part of Carnegie Hall's China Festival.

As Music Director of La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest since 2001, Mr. Lin has helped develop a festival that once focused primarily on chamber music into a multidiscipline festival featuring dance, jazz and a burgeoning new music program commissioning composers as diverse as Chick Corea, Stewart Copeland, Leon Kirchner, Christopher Rouse, Wayne Shorter, Kaija Saariaho and Gunther Schuller.

Cho-Liang Lin’s extensive discography includes recordings for Sony Classical, Decca, Ondine, Naxos and BIS. His albums have won such awards as Gramophone’s Record of the Year, as well as two Grammy Award nominations. His recordings reflect the breadth of his distinctive career including the standard violin concerti from Mozart to Stravinsky, chamber music from Brahms to Ravel and contemporary music from Chen Yi to Christopher Rouse. His most recent releases include Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Sejong and Anthony Newman, violin works of Bright Sheng and Gordon Chin on Naxos, and the First Violin Concerto by George Tsontakis on Koch.

Born in Taiwan in 1960, Cho-Liang Lin began his violin lessons when he was 5 years old with Sylvia Lee. At the age of 12, he went to Sydney to continue his musical studies with Robert Pikler. Inspired by an encounter with Itzhak Perlman while in Sydney, he traveled to New York in 1975 to audition for Perlman’s teacher, the late Dorothy DeLay, at the Juilliard School. He was to study with Miss DeLay for six years. At the age of nineteen Mr. Lin made his New York debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival and soon thereafter with the New York Philharmonic and his concert career was launched. In 2000 Musical America named Mr. Lin its Instrumentalist of the Year. He was invited to join the faculty of the Juilliard School in 1991. More recently he was appointed professor of violin at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He plays the 1715 "Titian" Stradivarius.