Mira Wang

Violinist Mira Wang has negotiated the passage from child prodigy in her native Beijing, China to internationally prominent soloist and chamber musician. Wang studied at Beijing's prestigious Central Conservatory, where she won a sponsorship from her teacher, Roman Totenberg, to attend Boston University in Massachusetts. She earned a summa cum laude degree from that school, as well as its Kahn Award. Wang went on to win first prizes at, among other places, the Geneva International Competition. Her solo credits include appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the NDR Philharmonic Hannover, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Wang has premiered major contemporary works including Chen Yi's Spring in Dresden violin concerto and double concertos for violin and cello by John Harbison and Wolfgang Rihm. In those works, her collaborator was her husband, cellist Jan Vogler. The pair also recorded an album of violin-cello duos for the Berlin Classics label in 1999, and they joined forces for a violin concerto and cello concerto by Saint-Saëns three years later. She made her debut at New York's Avery Fisher Hall in 2001, with the American Symphony Orchestra. Wang has also played chamber music with a who's-who of top performers in the field, including Gautier Capuçon, Jeremy Denk, Lisa de la Salle, Louis Lortie, Alice Sara Ott, Oli Mustonen, and Hélène Grimaud. Wang and Vogler joined once again to record the double concertos of Harbison and Rihm, along with the Brahms Double Concerto in A minor, Op. 102, for the Sony Classical label. In 2005, Wang was named artistic director for the Model Room Musicales concert series in New York. In 2013, she became director of Germany's Moritzburg Festival Academy, a musical training program associated with the Moritzburg Chamber Music Festival. Wang plays a Stradivarius violin once owned by German virtuoso Joseph Joachim. ~ James Manheim