Esther Yoo

Violinist Esther Yoo has successfully made the transition from prodigy to adult artist after winning major prizes as a junior player. She has released several successful albums on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Yoo was born to South Korean parents in the U.S. in 1994. She took up the violin at age four. Her parents moved to Europe when she was six, and she was trained mostly there. Yoo asserts that she "may be unique among classical soloists in being fully tri-cultural." Yoo was educated in Belgium and Germany, and she also embraces her Korean family background. She gave her first concerto performance at age eight. In 2006, she took first prize in the junior division of the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition, and in 2010, she won the International Sibelius Violin Competition; she was not only the latter competition's youngest winner but its youngest-ever participant. Two years later, she became one of the youngest prize-winners at Belgium's Queen Elisabeth Competition. Yoo attended the International School of Brussels and gave her first concert at eight. She studied with Ana Chumachenco at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, Germany, and went on to the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo, Belgium, for an Artist Diploma, studying with Augustin Dumay. Her other teachers included Zakhar Bron, Leonid Kerbel, and Berent Korfker. From 2014 to 2016, she was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. Yoo was signed to Deutsche Grammophon and issued her debut album there in 2016 with the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Vladimir Ashkenazy; the Allmusic website named it one of the best releases of the year. Yoo has performed with numerous top orchestras, including most of the BBC ensembles, the Toronto Symphony, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Solo recitals have taken her to Wigmore Hall in London, Lincoln Center in New York, and the Oslo Opera House, among other venues. Yoo had had little exposure to her ancestral homeland of Korea previously but spent considerable time there after being locked down there in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a member, with fellow former New Generation artists Zhang Zuo (piano) and Narek Hakhnazaryan (cello) of the Z.E.N. Trio, with which she has performed extensively and toured Australia in 2022. Yoo has continued to record for Deutsche Grammophon, joining the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko for an album with concertos by Samuel Barber and Max Bruch in 2023. Yoo is an enthusiastic user of social media, maintaining a social media video channel that features instruction in violin technique as well as other topics.
© James Manheim /TiVo