Name: Ziyu Shang, trumpet
Start: 2026-01-31T18:00:00
Location: Northwestern Bienen School of Music

Feiyi Liao

Ziyu Shang

Northwestern Bienen School of Music

The Boston Musical Intelligencer praises the Isidore String Quartet’s “invigorating and refreshing” playing and “bold virtuosity.” Winner of a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022, the group was formed in 2019 at the Juilliard School. Since that time, the quartet has appeared in major series throughout North America, collaborating with eminent performers including James Ehnes, Jeremy Denk, Shai Wosner, and Jon Nakamatsu. The Isidore Quartet’s 2024-25 season included concert appearances across the US and Canada, as well as at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and multiple cities in Germany. Since their Banff Competition-winning performance featuring Billy Childs’s String Quartet No. 2 (“Awakenings”), the quartet has developed a strong connection to the composer’s works, and in the 2025-26 season, they will premiere a new string quartet written for them by Childs.

Isidore String Quartet

Northwestern University

Saxophonist, flutist, composer, and bandleader Kenny Garrett began his career as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, also playing and recording with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and Freddie Hubbard. Garrett’s solo work ranges from post-bop to soul, R&B, and spiritual jazz. He is the recipient of a 2010 Grammy Award and a 2022 NAACP Image Award, and in 2023 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. Pianist, guitarist, composer, and singer Antônio Carlos Jobim is widely considered one of the great exponents of Brazilian music, merging samba with cool jazz during the 1960s to create the internationally successful bossa nova style. His hit “The Girl from Ipanema,” from the Grammy-winning 1965 album Getz/Gilberto, has become one of the most recorded songs of all time.

Jazz Small Ensembles

Ryan Center for the Musical Arts

Internationally acclaimed Zimbabwean conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni is conductor-in-residence of Austria’s Klangforum Wien, artist-in-residence and conductor of the International Contemporary Ensemble, music director of the Composers Conference, and artistic advisor of the Boston Lyric Opera.

Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra

Ziyu Shang, trumpet

A member of the critically acclaimed PRISM Quartet, Taimur Sullivan has performed throughout the world, from the stages of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Knitting Factory to engagements in Russia, China, Europe, and Latin America. He has given the premieres of more than 300 works by composers including Julia Wolfe, Augusta Read Thomas, Tyshawn Sorey, Tania León, John Harbison, Jennifer Higdon, and Steve Mackey. His recent work with PRISM has led to crossover collaborations with such artists as Ravi Coltrane, Miguel Zenón, Joe Lovano, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Sō Percussion. This recital features Sullivan’s world premiere arrangement of Jessie Montgomery’s Peace; Bienen alumna Marilyn Shrude’s Nature’s Bard, inspired by the imagery of poet Emily Dickinson, Reza Vali’s Hajiani, accompanied by recordings of the Persian bagpipe ney anban, and music by Andrew List and Franz Liszt.

Taimur Sullivan, saxophone

Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall

Beginning his professional career as a fixture of the opera stage at Germany’s Theater Augsburg, Bienen alumnus Alexander York made his Bavarian State Opera debut in 2018 in Viktor Ullmann’s Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) as the Bedienter. From 2018 to 2021 he was a member of the opera studio of the Opéra national de Paris, and in 2023 he joined the soloist ensemble of Austria’s Linz State Theatre. Highlights of his 2025-26 season there include appearances as Malatesta in Don Pasquale, Faninal in Der Rosenkavalier, Ping in Turandot, Sepulchrave in Irmin Schmidt’s Gormenghast, and Adam in Mike Svoboda’s Adam and Eve. York is the recipient of a 2016 Fulbright Research Grant as well as a 2020 City of Gordes Prize and the Best Young Baritone or Bass Prize at the International Competition of Art Song in Gordes, France. He returns to the Bienen School for a Liederabend recital including music of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and John Duke.

Alexander York, baritone

One of the most distinctive artists and polymaths of his generation, Sir Stephen Hough combines a distinguished career as a pianist with those of a composer and writer. The first classical performer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, Hough is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from Northwestern University, the Royal Philharmonic Instrumentalist Award, and first prize at the Naumburg Competition. In 2014, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Hough has performed with most of the major European, Asian, and American orchestras and regularly plays recitals in major halls, concert series, and festivals around the world. His catalogue of over sixty albums has garnered prizes such as the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, several Grammy nominations, and eight Gramophone awards, including the “Gold Disc” Award, which named his complete Saint-Saëns Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past thirty years. As a composer, Hough has written commissions for institutions such as the Cliburn, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Wigmore Hall. Hough holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at Manchester’s Royal Northern College and is a faculty member at the Juilliard School.

Stephen Hough, piano

2026 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of legendary trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis. His Birth of the Cool recording sessions on the Capitol Records label were instrumental in the development of cool jazz, and on the Prestige Records label he recorded some of the earliest hard bop music. Over the course of his career he performed and recorded with jazz giants including Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock, and he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

The Northwestern University Jazz Orchestra pays tribute to Miles Davis during the centennial anniversary of his birth with the music from his 1957 Columbia Records release Miles Ahead. The album featured Davis on flugelhorn as the only soloist, and it was his first collaboration with arranger Gil Evans following the Birth of the Cool sessions. Miles Ahead was met with critical praise and became recognized as one of the most successful examples of the Third Stream movement, drawing emotional sophistication from its fusion of modern jazz and classical influences.

Northwestern University Jazz Orchestra

The Northwestern University Chamber Orchestra welcomes soprano Marie Engle for Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine, a stirring one-act opera depicting one woman’s final phone call with her ex-lover in a struggle of unrequited love. Concluding the evening is Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90 (“Italian”), a collection of impressions from his ten-month trip to Italy inspired by sunny blue skies, lively saltarello dances, religious solemnity, and timeless art and architecture.

Northwestern University Chamber Orchestra

From Joseph Wilcox Jenkins’s spirited American Overture to Frank Ticheli’s expressive Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Ensemble, this program invites listeners into a vibrant musical mosaic. Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop offers a fresh reimagining of her work Radiant Glow in a world premiere performance. The evening culminates in Paul Hindemith’s monumental Symphony in B-flat, composed after his emigration to the United States. Together, these works reflect the evolving landscape of American music, shaped by reflections on artistic identity and reinvention.

Symphonic Wind Ensemble

The ensemble performs Domenico Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater, as well as music of J. S. Bach and other Baroque period works for chorus and continuo.