Yang Jing (violinist)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Jing Yang (杨璟) is a Chinese violist and violinist born in 1983 on Gulangyu Island (Kulangsu), Xiamen, Fujian. She is regarded as one of Kulangsu’s three most famous classical musicians, along with Yin Chengzong and Xu Feiping. She has performed at events such as the UNESCO World Heritage Committee session celebrating Kulangsu’s inscription as a World Cultural Heritage site.

Jing started violin at age four and joined the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra at fifteen. At seventeen she switched to viola and studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. At twenty-one she won a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, followed by a second degree at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg under viola master Thomas Riebl. She became viola principal of Camerata Salzburg and the London Soloists Chamber Orchestra, and in 2009 she was named Associate Principal of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.

In 2012 Jing returned to China to become professor and chair of the viola department at Xiamen University. Her 2014 CD, Kulangsu: Through the Strings of Time, features works by Bach, Paganini, Saint-Saëns, Schumann and Sarasate. She began touring as a soloist in 2015, and in 2016 she started the Jing & Friends crossover band. In 2017 she recorded a collaboration with the punk band Collapsing Scenery and premiered Li Zili’s five-string viola concerto, Peace Concerto, with the Xiamen Philharmonic at a government event for the BRICS Summit.

Jing has earned multiple prizes, including first prize at the Arthur Bliss Works Competition in England, second prize at the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, third prize at the Bled Viola International Competition, and Best Interpretation of a Contemporary Work at the Bodensee Music Competition.

In 2024 she moved to the United States and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey. She is president of the Chinese String Musicians Association and a member of the US-China Young Leaders' Forum. She is known for playing a five-string soprano viola and helped popularize this instrument in recent years.