Leonard Fu

“Leonard Fu is a musician with a calling to be a soloist, an expressive artistic personality and a hopeful for the future of classical music” – Anton Barakhovsky, concertmaster of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Chinese-German violinist Leonard Fu’s love for music began at an early age when his two older sisters were practicing the violin and the piano and he started imitating the melodies on the piano by ear. Despite being non-musicians themselves, his parents saw his potential and enabled his first piano lesson at age four and his first violin lesson at age seven. Since then, Fu has performed in several countries across multiple continents, amongst them Germany, China, Russia, the United States, Italy and Spain.

He is an active soloist and chamber musician and has performed concerts with major orchestras (Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, Allentown Symphony Orchestra, Hamburger Sinfoniker and others), working with distinguished conductors such as Alexander Shelley, Andrew Manze, Diane Wittry, Elias Grandy, Marc Niemann and Dietger Holm. His chamber partners have included Mitsuko Uchida, Janine Jansen, Amihai Grosz, Jens-Peter Maintz, Laurence Lesser, Kim Kashkashian, Jörg Widmann, Donald Weilerstein, Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, Thomas Riebl, Manuel Fischer-Dieskau, Huang Hsin-Yu, Misha Amory and Gregor Horsch. He has likewise been a guest of renowned music festivals including the Marlboro Music Festival, Yellow Barn and the Perlman Music Program.

Leonard Fu is a laureate of several major competitions, such as the Joseph Joachim, Andrea Postacchini and Rodolfo Lipizer, and most recently the Ton & Erklärung and Schadt International String competitions, at which he received the First Prize.

Fu has a special interest in the performance of early music and was leader of the NEC Baroque Ensemble in 2018. Furthermore, he has premiered contemporary pieces by M. Sadowski, T. Skweres, L. Ma, C. Chen, and B. Bertelsmeier. He is an advocate of contemporary music and has received acknowledgment for performances of A. Schnittke’s Violin Sonata, L. Berio’s Sequenza VIII for violin solo, W. Lutoslawski’s Partita for Violin and Piano, and M. Davidovsky’s String Quartet No. 4. He collaborates closely with the upcoming generation of American composers such as Lingbo Ma, Robert Bui, Lila Wildy Quillin and Daniel Lubin. Together with his colleague and friend Yiliang Jiang, a violin duet (“Calligraphy” 2020) was dedicated to him by Lila Wildy Quillin, which premiered in Jordan Hall in November 2020.

Fu spent his youth studying with Ina Kertscher, Lara Lev and Tanja Becker-Bender at the music schools in Hannover and Hamburg, moving to the US to continue his studies with Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory of Music. In May 2023, he received his Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School where he studied with Donald Weilerstein and Catherine Cho. He is actively engaged in the role of teaching assistant to Catherine Cho and Pre-College faculty at the Juilliard School. He currently plays a “Lorenzo Storioni, Cremona, 1781” generously loaned from the instrument fund of Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben.

Since October 2024, Leonard Fu has been studying at Kronberg Academy with Antje Weithaas. His studies are funded by the Ginko patronage.