Wu Wei

The career of Chinese sheng player Wu Wei is notable for his openness to collaboration with Western composers and performers. He has made many recordings in Germany, his adopted home country. Wu Wei was born on April 29, 1970, in Gaoyou, China. He studied the sheng, a large free-reed Chinese mouth organ, at the Shanghai Conservatory and began his professional career in 1993, appearing with the Chinese Music Orchestra in Shanghai. A breakthrough for Wu Wei came in 1995, when he earned a four-year scholarship from the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service) and the FNS (the Friedrich Neumann Foundation), enabling him to study for four years in Berlin. He still lives in that city, although he also teaches the sheng at the Shanghai Conservatory. In 1998, he released an album, Sheng Organ for the Mouth, following that up in 2000 with Mouth Organ: Trad Chinese/Sheng. By the late 2000s decade, Wu Wei was attracting Western composers eager to write concertos for his instrument. One of the first of these was Huang Ruo's The Color of Yellow (2007); three concertos by Korean composer Unsuk Chin, a resident of Germany, won wide attention. Wu Wei has given the premieres of more than 300 works, including 20 concertos for sheng and orchestra. He has also written many works for the sheng himself. Wu Wei has appeared with major orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Berlin Philharmonic under conductor Kent Nagano, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, the BBC Symphony under Ilan Volkov, and the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki. Wu Wei recorded three concertos by Unsuk Chin for Deutsche Grammophon with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Myung-Whun Chung in 2014 and went on to record for Wergo and Deutsche Harmonia Mundi. With actress Karine Viard, he released the children's album Le sheng amoureux in 2015, and in 2019, he joined the ensemble Holland Baroque on PentaTone Classics for the album Silk Baroque. In 2024, Wu Wei recorded composer Rolf Wallin's sheng concerto Five Seasons for the Ondine label with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra.
© James Manheim /TiVo