Emily Liu
Viola
Emily Liu, 21, a San Francisco native, is currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree of music in viola performance at The Juilliard School, studying with Hsin-Yun Huang and Misha Amory. She has previously studied with Jodi Levitz at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division.
In previous years, Emily has participated in many orchestral and chamber music programs. She was a member in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra for several years, where she was the principal violist during the 2013-2014 season. An avid chamber musician, Emily was part of the Verbena Viola Quintet in Susan Bates’ Young Chamber Musicians Program where she performed in master classes with the Borromeo Quartet, the Miro Quartet and many more. She also had the opportunity to perform the Mendelssohn Octet with the Borromeo Quartet integrating technology by using laptops, reading off the original manuscript of the work. Since the fall of 2015, Emily is a principal violist of the Juilliard Orchestra. In January 2016, she participated in Juilliard’s annual ChamberFest – an intensive one-week chamber music program, performing the Mendelssohn Piano Sextet under the coaching of Daniel Phillips. Since then, she played in ChamberFest in 2017, performing the Arensky String Quartet with two cellos, and, in 2018, performed the Enescu Octet in Alice Tully Hall. This past summer, she had the opportunity to perform again with members of Borromeo Quartet at the Heifetz Institute, playing a viola quintet arrangement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.
In 2013, Emily won 3rd place in the Northern California Viola Society Competition and also won “Best Performance” of the newly commissioned work “Fluttertude” composed by Kurt Rohde. A few months later, she won 2nd place in the Chinese Music Teacher Association of Northern California competition. Emily has worked with many renowned musicians in master classes and privately, with artists like Geraldine Walther, Cynthia Phelps, Jonathan Vinocour, Thomas Riebl, David Finckel, Donald Weilerstein, Roger Tapping and more.
In past summers, Emily has attended Music@Menlo (2011, 2012) and the Aspen Music Festival (2013, 2014), where she was the assistant viola principal of the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra. In the summer of 2015, she attended the Yellow Barn Young Artists’ Program in Putney, Vermont, and had the opportunity to be a fellow at the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra Music Workshop in Aptos, California. In 2016, Emily spent another summer at Yellow Barn’s YAP program and also attended Thomas Riebl’s International Summer Academy in Bad Leonfelden, Austria. This past summer of 2017, Emily attended the Heifetz International Music Institute in Staunton, Virginia and went on tour with the Juilliard Orchestra and the Sibelius Academy to Finland and Stockholm.