Teng Li

The Chinese-born Canadian violist Teng Li is one of the top players of her instrument in North America, having held principal viola chairs with the Toronto Symphony and then the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. She is also energetically active as a concerto soloist, chamber music player, and educator. Li was born in Nanjing, China, around 1983. Her father was a Beijing Opera singer who was sent to work in a coal mine during China's Cultural Revolution, but still harbored musical dreams for his daughter. She began violin studies at age five and quickly outstripped local teachers, whereupon her father began carrying her on a bicycle to the train station for lessons in Beijing. In 1992 Li entered China's Central Conservatory, where one of her classmates was pianist Lang Lang. She started on the violin, but a viola professor said, "We always make the worst violin players violists as a back-up career path. This year, there are so many players; I want a good violinist to become a violist. I want her." She moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, winning a place at the school by auditioning at the age of 16, and studying with Michael Tree and Joseph de Pasquale. She was recruited by Toronto Symphony conductor Peter Oundjian and became the orchestra's principal violist at the unheard-of age of 21. In addition to her orchestral activities, she has performed solos with the Santa Rosa Symphony, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Canadian Sinfonietta, and more. She has performed at major festivals including the Mostly Mozart Festival and those in Marlboro (Vermont) and Santa Fe. Li performed with the Guarneri Quartet in its last season, in 2009, and has been a member of the Rosamunde Quartet and Toronto's Trio Arkel. She teaches at the University of Toronto and the Conservatoire de Musique de Montreal, and she is artistic director of Morningside Music Bridge, a Canada-based festival and summer institute that has also mounted events in Poland and China. In 2018 she was named the principal violist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Li was featured on Azica Records' 2015 release 1939, examining music from that year, and her recording of Vaughan Williams' Flos Campi appeared on Chandos in 2018.
© James Manheim /TiVo