Tristan Zhu is a scholarship fellow at the Academy of the Music Institute of Chicago, a training center for advanced pre-college musicians, where he studies with Almita Vamos and Davis King. He began studying violin at age 5, his previous teachers include Aurelien Pederzoli and Timothy Hager.
He is a member of Pelios String Quartet, who won the Silver Medal at the 2023 Fischoff National Chamber Music Junior String Competition, and won the Gold Medal and Best Haydn Performance at the 2023 Saint Paul String Quartet Junior Competition. As a member of the Seraphim String Quartet, he has also won both the String and Piano Division Prize and the Grand Award of the 2024 Barnett Chamber Music Competition.
In 2023, Tristan was awarded the Winner of the DePaul Concerto Festival 2023 and solo performance with Oistrakh Symphony Orchestra; Winner of DuPage Symphony Orchestra’s 2023 Young Artists Auditions and solo performance with the orchestra; Winner of West Suburban Symphony’s 2022-2023 Solo Contest for High School Students and solo performance with the orchestra; Finalist of Ronald Sachs International Music Competition 2023; Solo performance at Carnegie Hall in April, 2022; 1st Place Winner of 2022 International Music Competition “London” Grand Prize Virtuoso.
Tristan has participated in masterclasses with Midori Gotō, Ani Kavafian, David Finckel, Wu Han, Timothy Ridout, Richard Lin, Rachel Barton Pine, Kirill Troussov, and the Cuarteto Latinomericano. Summer programs include studying with Sergiu Schwartz at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, attending the Montecito International Music Festival, the International Academy of Music (Italy), and Goppisberger Musikfestival und Akademie (Switzerland).
As an orchestral musician, Tristan performs with the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy Orchestra and Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Orchestra, as a concertmaster and principal second Violinist respectively. The orchestras regularly appear at Nichols Hall and Chicago Symphony Center’s Orchestra Hall. During the CYSO summer concert tour, Tristan performed at Gewandhaus (Great Hall) in Leipzig (Germany), Rudolphium in Prague (Czech), and Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna (Austria) during its summer concert tour.
1. Caprice No5, Paganini, 2:55, https://youtu.be/jFNv9hPA_Mk