Camerata Pacifica’s Principal Violist, Richard Yongjae O’Neill, is widely celebrated in both the country of his birth, the United States, and that of his heritage, Korea, where, amongst other distinctions, he was the subject of a two-part, five-hour documentary for the Korean Broadcasting System broadcast to over 12 million people. He has been featured on all of the nation’s major television networks, magazines and newspapers. In the United States he is one of the few violists to ever be awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant as well as a 48th Annual GRAMMY Award Nomination (Best Soloist with Orchestra). He has performed on CNN and PBS, served as a Young Artist-in-Residence for National Public Radio’s Performance Today in Washington D.C., and has been broadcast on BBC-3, the CBC Live from the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, WQXR, WFMT, and most of the broadcast stations nationwide.

A UNIVERSAL CLASSICS Recording Artist, his latest album “Winter Journey” for Deutsche Grammophon debuted this past October and has earned him a Platinum Disc Award: his debut album for UNIVERSAL released in 2005 garnered him a Gold Disc Award. His second album was the unprecedented #1 Bestselling Classical (as well as International Pop) Recording for 2006, garnering him a Double Platinum Disc Award. In addition to his recording contract with UNIVERSAL/DG, Mr. O'Neill is dedicated to recording lesser known music for labels such as Naxos, Bridge, Centaur and Tzadik: his recordings of Schoenberg and Webern for Naxos were the subject of an extensive New York Times article which described his performances as revelatory. His recording of Schoenberg's String Quartet Concerto as a member of the Fred Sherry String Quartet earned him the GRAMMY Nomination. Recordings of Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola as well as Schoenberg's String Trio, Ode to Napoleon and Third String Quartet are due to be released on Naxos in the coming year as well as his fourth solo album with Concerto Köln featuring Baroque repertoire for ARCHIV/DG.

RIchard has selected composer Huang Ruo to write his Chamber Concerto.

Huang Ruo was born in Hainan Island, China, in 1976, the year the Chinese Cultural Revolution ended. His father, who is a well-known composer in China, began teaching him composition and piano when he was six years old. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, when China was steadily opening up its gates to the Western world, he received both traditional and Western education at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He was admitted into its composition program. As a result of the dramatic cultural and economic changes in China following the Cultural Revolution, his education expanded from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Lutoslawski to include the Beatles, rock and roll, heavy metal, and jazz. Huang Ruo was able to absorb all of these newly allowed Western influences without inhibiting factors. As a member of the new generation of Chinese composers, he clearly knows that his goal and task is not just to simply mix both Western and Eastern elements, but to go beyond that to create a seamless synthesis and a convincing organic unity, drawing influences from various genres and cultures.

Huang Ruo was recently award both the First Prize and the Audience Award from the prestigious Luxembourg International Composition Prize 2008. Hailed by The New Yorker as “one of the most intriguing of the new crop of Asian-American composers,” his music has been premiered and performed by, among others, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Asko Ensemble, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Dutch Vocal Laboratory, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, under conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, James Conlon, Dennis Russell Davies, Ed Spanjaard, and Ilan Volkov. His music has been played in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall and Weill Recital Hall, Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, Symphony Space (New York), the Academy of Music (Philadelphia), the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Harris Concerto Hall (Aspen), the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ and Paradiso (Amsterdam), the Shanghai Concert Hall, and the Hong Kong City Hall cultural complex.

Richard and Camerata Pacifica will premiere Huang Ruo’s commission in the Fall of 2010.