At the age of 13, Richard Young was invited to perform for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium at the Royal Palace in Brussels. Since then he has been soloist with various orchestras and has given solo and chamber music recitals throughout North and South America, Europe, the Far East, Africa, and Australia. A special award winner in the Rockefeller Foundation American Music Competition, he was a member of the New Hungarian Quartet as well as the violinist of the Rogeri Piano Trio. From 1985 he was the violist of the renowned Vermeer String Quartet.
Mr. Young has performed at many prestigious festivals throughout the world and has recorded over three dozen works for Teldec, Naxos, Orion, Cedille, Vox, Musical Heritage, Angelicum, and Alden Productions. He has received three Grammy nominations, and was the producer of the Vermeer Quartet’s CD of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, which has been broadcast to over 60 million people throughout the world. His most recent CD – with Alex Klein and Ricardo Castro – includes works for viola, oboe, and piano by Loeffler, Klughardt, Hindemith, White, and Yano. Mr. Young is also the author of a best-selling book on Haydn entitled Echoes from Calvary, published by Rowman & Littlefield. He has taught at Northern Illinois University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia), Wichita State University, North Park University, and was chairman of the string faculty at Oberlin Conservatory. He has an honorary doctorate from Dominican University and is a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. His recent master classes include the Paris Conservatory, the International Academy for Chamber Music of Lower Saxony, FEMUSC in Brazil, the Geneva Conservatory in Switzerland, the Dutch String Quartet Academy in Amsterdam, and the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin.
In addition to his more traditional teaching activities, Mr. Young has done a substantial amount of inner-city volunteer work for the benefit of disadvantaged children – at the People’s Music School in Chicago, and as a supervisor of the International Music Foundation’s extensive “outreach” program. He has also been seriously involved with various social/music projects, including the YOURS Project in Chicago, NEOJIBA in Brazil, Esperanza Azteca in Mexico, and BATUTA in Colombia. His Comprehensive String Pedagogy & Curriculum provides uncommon assistance for teachers and conductors of both sistema-inspired projects and traditional youth orchestras.