Meet the Jury members
Zheng Zhou-bass-baritone
Prof.of Voice at Shanghai Conservatory of Music
Zheng Zhou possesses a “rich, creamy baritone” voice (Los Angeles Times), and has excelled with major opera companies and orchestras in a wide range of styles from Mozart, Donizetti and Schubert to Verdi, Mendelssohn and Orff. He has been hailed by the St. Louis Dispatch as "a superior musician," while his performance of Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor led the San Francisco Examiner to exclaim, "Zheng Zhou shone. His fiercely concentrated, vocally and theatrically incisive Enrico would have been an asset in any Lucia.” The American Record Guide declared him “a sensationally good voice… that has the weight and depth of a bass and the comfortable upper range of a baritone” on his Art Songs CD.
Zheng Zhou holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the St. Louis Conservatory, and the Shanghai Conservatory, as well as a diploma in Lieder performance from the Schubert Institute in Vienna. He has studied with John Wustman, Edward Zambara, Hans Hotter, and Yi Kwei Sze. Zhou has won numerous awards and scholarships including first prize at the Mae M. Whitaker International Competition, and has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Teatro Real in Madrid, Vancouver Opera, San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, New Mexico Symphony, China National Symphony, China Philharmonic Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra,LA Master Chorale, Master Chorale of Washington D.C., and the Tanglewood Festival and Carnegie Hall, among many others.
Zhou also specializes in Lieder; with the New York Festival of Song he has sung Des Knaben Wunderhorn with mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer and a program of Russian Masters, and he has given recitals in San Franciso Opera’s Schwabacher Debut Recital Series, Baden bei Wien – Austria, and at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He can be heard on his Brioso Recordings CD entitled “Art Songs,” singing select lieder works by C.P.E. Bach, Hugo Wolf, Tchaikovsky and Sviridov, accompanied by pianist Joanne Kong.
In 2006, Zhou was invited to be a vocal professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he currently engages his extensive international studies and expertise to contribute to and expand the vocal study program. He has championed the study of Lieder in particular, creating the department’s first and only dedicated lieder course concluding in a much-lauded performance recital each year. His students have gone on to study, perform, and win awards internationally. Just in June 10, 2021, his tenor student Zhuohan SUN has just won the important prize of this year’s Internationaler Robert-Schumann-Wettbewerb in Zwickau, Germany.
Zhou continues to perform in recent years, as Pang Haogong in the debut of Hao Weiya’s “The River of Spring” at both the Shanghai Grand Theater and the Tianjin Theater, for a solo concert at the Shanghai Oriental Grand Music Hall, and as Master Cao in the debut of Xu Jianqiang’s “Tang Xianzu” at the Beijing National Center for Performing Arts.
Professor Zhou has also been invited to judge and teach at various international musical institutions, including the Concorso Internazionale Musica Sac in Rome, at Liekunst im Schloss vor Husum Germany. the Lieder Project at the China Festival in Hamburg, Master-class the Arezzo Summer Festival in Arezzo, and at the Mozarteum Summer Academy in Salzburg in 2017, 2018 and 2019. And upcoming The Master classes of Opera and Lied 2020, 21 and 22 with Savonlinna Summer University and University of Fine Arts – Sibelius Academy.