Li Dan

FIVE young musicians from the prestigious Munich Conservatory (MHsM) will make their China debut at the Shenzhen Grand Theater on Wednesday night.

The program will include “Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 15” by Gabriel Fauré, “Piano Trio No.2 in E Minor, Op.67” by Dmitri Shostakovich and “Piano Quintet in A Minor, Op. 84” by Edward Elgar.

Identifying itself as the MHsM Piano Quintet, the team consists of Chinese pianist Yuan Fang and string players Noah Bendix-Balgley, Johanna Kmel, Benedikt Schneider and Sarah Wiederhold. All in their 20s, the musicians have won many awards in the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

Praised by Friedemann Berger, founder of the Chamber Music Department at MHsM, as “the best quintet in Munich in recent years,” the team has performed at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland and the Marx-Hegel Music Festival in Bavaria, Germany. The team has also been a frequent guest at the annual Munich Chamber Music Festival.

Chopin, Schubert, Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Shostakovitch: These masters have created innumerable classical works for generations to come. But there are also many other excellent composers who are not as famous. Unlike other teams of young performers keen on classical traditions, the MHsM Piano Quintet is equally focused on introducing less famous chamber music pieces to audiences.

The five performed “The Piano Quintet” by British composer Edward Elgar at the Munich Chamber Music Festival to great acclaim from the audience and music critics, and the Bavaria Radio Station will soon release an album of the performance.

Yuan, born in 1982, migrated with her parents to Shenzhen at the age of 9. She was the only student from Guangdong enrolled by the primary school attached to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1993. She has learned piano under professor Wu Yuan, and received instructions from Li Qifang and Dan Zhaoyi.

She began to learn piano from Gerhard Oppitz at the MHsM in 2001, and received a master’s degree in 2005. She then furthered her studies with professor Michael Schaefer. Yuan has given many solo, duo and quintet concerts during her six years in Germany. The winner of the Munich International Music Competition for Youth in the piano category in 2004, Yuan is the youngest member of the Munich Piano Society. Last year, she became a contracted musician with the “Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now” program sponsored by the biggest music foundation in Europe.

“His seemingly casual inflexion may first impress you as a touch of melancholy, but soon you will find out it’s a small joke he played on you….I can see his hearty smile, as if reflected from a mirror,” Yuan once said about Mozart, her favorite musician.

No wonder Paul Badora-Skoda praised her “Salve tu Domine” as having brought out the “authentic Mozart spirit.”