International Piano Magazine considers Yuan Sheng “China’s premier Bach interpreter”, the New York Times describes his Bach playing as “a model of clarity, balance and proportion”. Yuan Sheng studied in his native country in Bejing, and through a scholarship entered Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Solomon Mikowsky and later with Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck. His interpretation of Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations is genuinely personal, but never artificial or self conscious. He doesn’t use the piano as a “pianistic” instrument (though his technical command is all the more impressive), but simply as a means to express the message of this music, a human message of beauty, joy and sorrow.
