Tianwa Yang

At thirteen Tianwa Yang became the youngest musician to have recorded Paganini's twenty-four Caprices, and the appetite for complete cycles has not left her since. Born in Beijing in 1987 and taught there by Lin Yaoji, she came to Germany at sixteen on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and worked afterwards with Jörg-Wolfgang Jahn and Anner Bylsma. Her Naxos survey of Sarasate — very nearly the complete violin works, the salon miniatures set beside the concert showpieces — took a Diapason d'Or and remains the recording by which she is most widely known; complete Saint-Saëns and Wolfgang Rihm followed, and a Prokofiev disc with the Vienna Radio Symphony under Jun Märkl. The ECHO Klassik named her young artist of 2014 and instrumentalist of 2015, and the German record critics gave her their annual prize. She has appeared with the Gewandhausorchester, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the BBC Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic, the Singapore Symphony and the Helsinki Philharmonic, with conductors including Neeme Järvi, Michael Sanderling, Märkl, Darrell Ang and Vladimir Fedoseyev. She holds a professorship in violin at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg.