Richard Young/Aubrey Finehouse, viola
ABOUT THE MASTER
At the age of thirteen, Richard Young was invited to perform for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium at the Royal Palace in Brussels. Since then he has been a soloist with various orchestras and has given solo and chamber music recitals throughout North and South America, Europe, the Far East, Africa, and Australia. A special award winner in the Rockefeller Foundation American Music Competition, he was a member of the New Hungarian Quartet as well as the violinist of the Rogeri Piano Trio. From 1985 he was the violist of the renowned Vermeer String Quartet.
Mr. Young has performed at many prestigious festivals throughout the world and has recorded over three dozen works for Teldec, Naxos, Orion, Cedille, Vox, Musical Heritage, Angelicum, and Alden Productions. He has received three Grammy nominations, and was the producer of the Vermeer Quartet’s CD of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, which has been broadcast to over 60 million people throughout the world. His most recent CD – with Alex Klein and Ricardo Castro – includes works for viola, oboe, and piano by Loeffler, Klughardt, Hindemith, White, and Yano. Mr. Young is also the author of a best-selling book entitled Echoes from Calvary: Meditations on Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, published by Rowman & Littlefield. He has taught at Northern Illinois University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Wichita State University, North Park University, and was chairman of the string faculty at Oberlin Conservatory. He has an honorary doctorate from Dominican University and is a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. His masterclasses this year include the Paris Conservatory, the International Academy for Chamber Music of Lower Saxony, FEMUSC (Santa Catarina, Brazil), the Dutch String Quartet Academy in Amsterdam, and the Hochschule fur Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin.
In addition to his more traditional teaching activities, Mr. Young does a substantial amount of inner-city volunteer work for the benefit of disadvantaged children – at the People’s Music School in Chicago, and as a supervisor of the International Music Foundation’s extensive outreach program. He is also involved in various El Sistema projects, including the YOURS Orchestra (El Sistema Chicago) and Neojiba (El Sistema Brazil) where he now regularly teaches technique and chamber music.