Connie Shih

Pianist Connie Shih has flourishing careers both as a duet partner with cellist Stephen Isserlis and as a solo artist. She has appeared as a recitalist and concerto soloist around North America, Europe, and East Asia. Shih was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her older sisters, Patricia and Anne Shih, are both noted classical musicians. When Connie was nine, she performed Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. At 12, she was accepted as the youngest student ever of the pedagogue Gyorgy Sebok at Indiana University, and she later studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Artur Schnabel's student Claude Frank and privately in Europe with Fou Ts'ong. In 1993, Shih won Canada's Sylva Gelber Award for the country's most outstanding classical artist under the age of 30. She has appeared both as a recitalist and concerto soloist around North America as well as in Europe, China, and Japan. For a time, she was based in Freiburg, Germany. Shih is especially notable as a chamber music player, with several high-profile collaborators. Most prominent among these is Isserlis, with whom she has appeared at Wigmore Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York, as well as touring in Japan. She has also accompanied violinists Joshua Bell, Isabelle Faust, and Maxim Vengerov, violist Tabea Zimmermann, and cellist Manuel Fischer-Dieskau. Shih has recorded with several of her collaborators. In 2011, she and Fischer-Dieskau made the world premiere recording of the complete cello sonatas of Carl Reinecke on the MDG label. With cellist Winona Zelenka, she issued the cello-and-piano recital Connections the following year. She has made several albums with Isserlis, including The Cello in Wartime (BIS, 2017), where Isserlis played an instrument from the World War I trenches. She and Fischer-Dieskau recorded Beethoven's complete cello sonatas for BIS in 2018. Shih rejoined Isserlis in 2021 for the album Proust's Salons, performing music associated with writer Marcel Proust. ~ James Manheim