At the age of thirteen, Richard Young was invited to perform for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium at the Royal Palace in Brussels. Since then, he has been a soloist with several orchestras and has given solo and chamber music recitals throughout North and South America, Europe, the Far East, Africa and Australia. Winner of a special award at the Rockefeller Foundation’s American music contest, he was a member of the new Hungarian quartet and violinist of the Rogeri Piano Trio. From 1985 onwards he was a violist for the renowned Vermeer String Quartet.
Mr. Young performed at many prestigious festivals around the world and recorded more than three dozen works for Teldec, Naxos, Orion, Cedille, Vox, Musical Heritage, Angelicum and Alden Productions. He received three Grammy nominations and was the CD producer of the Vermeer Quartet of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, which was broadcast to more than 60 million people worldwide. His most recent CD – with Alex Klein and Ricardo Castro – includes works for Viola, Oboe and Piano by Loeffler, Klughardt, Hindemith, White and Yano. Young is also the author of a bestselling book entitled Echoes from Calvary: Meditations on Franz Joseph Haydn’s the Seven Last Words of Christ, published by Rowman & Littlefield.
He taught at Northwestern Illinois University at the University of Michigan at Northwestern University at Wichita State University, North Park University and was president of the strings of Oberlin Conservatory. He has an honorary doctorate from the Dominican University and is a member of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. Its masterclasses this year include the Paris Conservatory, the International Academy of Chamber Music of Lower Saxony, Femusc (Santa Catarina, Brazil), the Dutch Academy of String Quartets in Amsterdam and the Hochschule Fur Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin.
In addition to his more traditional teaching activities, Young does a substantial amount of volunteer work in the city center for the benefit of disadvantaged children – at the People’s Music School in Chicago and as supervisor of the extensive extension program of the International Music Foundation. He is also involved in several projects of the El System, including Yours Orchestra (El Sistema Chicago) and Neojiba (El Sistema Brasil), where he now regularly teaches technique and chamber music.