About the Participants

Yiliang Jiang

Yiliang Jiang, violin (Wuxi, China), is about to start his GD with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory of Music. Yiliang won 4th Place in the 55th Premio Paganini International Violin Competition, and won the top prize of the Dorothy Delay Fellowship at the Aspen Music Festival. In May 2013, Yiliang won 2nd Place in the Adults Group of the Andrea Postacchini International Violin Competition. Since 2011, Yiliang has collaborated with the China Philharmonic Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Leonard Fu

Leonard Fu, born in Kiel, Germany, began playing the violin at age seven after having begun to learn piano three years earlier. He is currently finishing his Master degree at New England with Donald Weilerstein and will be starting his Artist Diploma at the Juilliard School of Music under the tutelage of Donald Weilerstein and Catherine Cho this coming fall.
Leonard has played concerts all over Europe, Asia, and the US and performed as a soloist with prestigious orchestras such as the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the NDR Radiophilharmonic Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonic Orchestra Bremerhaven, under the batons of Alexander Shelley, Andrew Manze, Elias Grandy i.a. Amongst his many chamber music partners are Laurence Lesser, Kim Kashkashian, Donald and Vivian Weilerstein, Janine Jansen, Jörg Widmann, Tanja Becker-Bender, Jens-Peter Maintz, the Kuss quartet, Gregor Horsch, Thomas Riebl, and Amihai Grosz. Over the past decade Leonard has been laureate of the Postacchini, Lipizer, Joachim competitions and has most recently won the Ton & Erklärung 2020 Violin Competition in Frankfurt, Germany. He also is the recipient of a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Abraham Skernick Memorial Presidential Scholarship. Leonard currently plays on a violin by Charles Claude Francois Darche from Brussels, ca. 1850. Leonard’s other interests include Jazz, composition, politics, philosophy, and gaming

Sabrina Bradford

Bradford received her Master of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music (OH), studying with Stephen Rose, and her Bachelor of Music from Vanderbilt University (TN) as a student of Dr. Carolyn Huebl. Currently: second violin with the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Bethesda, MD. Has played regularly as a substitute with the Nashville Symphony for 3 years.

Eric Chen

Eric Charles Chen, born in Princeton New Jersey, began his violin studies at the age of 4 and currently studies with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory. At 9 years old, he had his first solo performance with the Livingston orchestra and was accepted to the Juilliard Pre-college where he began his studies with Naoko Tanaka and later also studied with Cho-Liang Lin. Eric has received first prize at the 2019 Cooper International Competition, the 2017 Juilliard Pre-college concerto competition, and the First Sylvia Lee Young Violinist Competition in Taipei.