Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Los Angeles, Yeh pursued premedical studies at UCLA, where he also won the Frank Sinatra Musical Performance Award. He entered the Juilliard School of Music in 1975 and attended music schools in Aspen, Marlboro, and Tanglewood. He cites Harold Wright, Ray Still, Marcel Moyse, Allan Dennis, and Mehli Mehta as influential mentors.
He is director of Chicago Pro Musica, which received the Grammy Award in 1986 for Best New Classical Artist. He frequently pla...
Read MoreBorn in Washington, D.C., and raised in Los Angeles, Yeh pursued premedical studies at UCLA, where he also won the Frank Sinatra Musical Performance Award. He entered the Juilliard School of Music in 1975 and attended music schools in Aspen, Marlboro, and Tanglewood. He cites Harold Wright, Ray Still, Marcel Moyse, Allan Dennis, and Mehli Mehta as influential mentors.
He is director of Chicago Pro Musica, which received the Grammy Award in 1986 for Best New Classical Artist. He frequently plays at festivals and on chamber music series worldwide and has performed several times with Music from Marlboro, the Guarneri, Ying, Colorado, Pacifica, and Avalon string quartets, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
As half of the duo Double Dialogue, he performs innovative programs with composer-computer sound artist Howard Sandroff. Their recording, Dialogues with My Shadow, of works by Boulez, Carl, Martino, Levin, and Sandroff is available on the Koch International Classics label.
Yeh has performed concertos with the CSO on several occasions, including the 1998 American Premiere of Elliott Carter's Clarinet Concerto with Pierre Boulez conducting, as well as the 1993 performance of Carl Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto with Neeme Jarvi.
A concert recording of the Nielsen has been released on the CSO-CD set "Soloists of the Orchestra II: From the Archives, Volume 15." In 2004 Yeh was featured in Leonard Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs in collaboration with the Hubbard Street Dance Company and the CSO conducted by David Robertson. A prizewinner at both the 1982 Munich International Music Competition and the 1985 Naumburg Clarinet Competition in New York, Yeh continues to solo with orchestras around the globe.
His more than a dozen solo and chamber music recordings, including the recent release of clarinet chamber music by Hindemith on Cedille Records (see www.cedillerecords.org), have earned worldwide critical acclaim. Together with his wife clarinetist Teresa Reilly, erhu virtuoso Wang Guowei and pipa virtuoso Yang Wei, John recently formed Birds and Phoenix, an innovative quartet dedicated to musical exploration by bridging eastern and western musical cultures.
In their highly acclaimed debut performance in September of 2006, the group presented works by Victoria Bond, Pamela Chen, Lu Pei, and Bright Sheng, all commissioned for them by Fontana Chamber Arts in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They are scheduled to repeat this program on June 28 and 30 as part of the Fontana Summer Festival (www.fontanachamberarts.org).
Passionately committed to music education, Mr. Yeh served for 26 years on the clarinet faculty of DePaul University's School of Music, and joined the faculty at Roosevelt University's Chicago College for the Performing Arts in 2004. In addition, he is on the faculty of Midwest Young Artists in Fort Sheridan, Illinois (www.mya.org). John is the proud father of Jenna Yeh, 21, a Culinary Arts student at Kendall College in Chicago, Molly Yeh, 17, the award-winning young percussionist with MYA, and Mia Reilly-Yeh, who happily celebrates her first birthday on March 20, 2007.
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