Cellist Sophie Shao, winner of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and top prizes at the Rostropovich and Tchaikovsky competitions, is a versatile and passionate artist whose performances the New York Times has noted as “eloquent, powerful” and the Washington Post called “deeply satisfying.”
Shao has appeared as soloist to critical acclaim throughout the United States. Last season she performed the UK premiere of Howard Shore’s concerto Mythic Gardens with Keith Lockhart and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Watford Colosseum in Watford, England and with Ludwig Wicki and the 21st Century Orchestra at the KKL in Lucerne, Switzerland. Other past concerto performances include Haydn and Elgar Concerti with Lockhart and the BBC Concert Orchestra, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Hans Graf, and the Houston Symphony, Richard Wilson’s The Cello Has Many Secrets with the American Symphony Orchestra and has returned with the ASO to perform Saint-Saens’s La muse et la poete at the Bard Music Festival.
Shao has given recitals in Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Middlebury College, Walter Reade Theater and Rose Studio in Lincoln Center, the complete Bach Suites at Union College and in New York City. Her dedication to chamber music has conceived her popular “Sophie Shao and Friends” groups which have toured from Brattleboro, VT to Sedona, AZ, while other exciting collaborations include Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera with Cho-Liang Lin, performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chamber Music Northwest, and Music Mountain (with the Shanghai Quartet), among many other presenters across the country. She is a frequent guest at many leading festivals around the country, and was a member of Chamber Music Society Two, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s program for emerging young artists.
Shao’s recordings include Andre Previn’s Reflections for Cello and English Horn and Orchestra, Richard Wilson’s Diablerie and Brash Attacks, and Barbara White’s My Barn Having Burned to the Ground, I Can Now See the Moon, Howard Shore’s original score for the movie The Betrayal, and the music of George Tsontakis.
A native of Houston, Texas, Sophie Shao began playing the cello at age six, and was a student of Shirley Trepel, former principal cellist of the Houston Symphony. At age thirteen she enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, studying cello with David Soyer. After graduating from the Curtis Institute, she continued her cello studies with Aldo Parisot at Yale University, receiving a BA in Religious Studies from Yale College and an MM from the Yale School of Music, where she was enrolled as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She is on the faculty of Vassar College and the Bard Conservatory of Music and plays on a cello made by Honore Derazey from 1855 once owned by Pablo Casals.