🇨🇳 Aozhe Zhang

Aozhe Zhang was born in 2008 in Hefei, in China's Anhui province. He began training at the age of four. He is a student at the Music Middle School affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he studies with He Xian. By his mid-teens he had appeared as a soloist with the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and the Kunming Nie Er Symphony Orchestra, among others.

At fourteen he performed the complete set of Paganini's 24 Caprices — the body of work that functions as the standard technical benchmark of the violin repertoire, and one most players approach only at conservatory level, if at all. His first major title came in 2023, when he won the Golden Bell Award at the 14th Chinese Golden Bell Award for Music, reported as the youngest winner in that award's history.

In 2024 he won first prize at the Rodolfo Lipizer International Violin Competition in Gorizia, Italy, together with two special prizes for the best Lipizer etude and the best interpretation of a new work. In June 2025 he took third prize at the Sendai International Music Competition in Japan. That sequence — an Italian first prize, a Japanese podium — set up the two results that defined the rest of his year.

The first was the Tibor Varga International Violin Competition in Sion, Switzerland, founded in 1967, whose final was held on Saturday 30 August 2025 at the city's newly opened NODA BCVS concert hall. The three finalists each performed a concerto of their choice with the South Czech Philharmonic under the Ukrainian conductor Valentin Uryupin, plus a solo work composed after 1970. Zhang, seventeen and the youngest competitor in the field, played Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major.

He won first prize — the Prize of the City of Sion, worth CHF 20,000 — along with the CHF 500 Youth Jury Prize. Second prize went to Maria Lundina of Russia, aged twenty-five; third to Reika Sato of Japan, aged twenty-six. The jury was chaired by Pavel Vernikov and included Monika Baer, Ariadne Daskalakis, Sunny Lee, Fumiaki Miura, Lucie Robert and Anton Sorokow.

Ten weeks later came the 58th Premio Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa, open to violinists aged fifteen to thirty. The final round was held at the Teatro Carlo Felice on Saturday 25 October 2025, with each of the three finalists performing the mandatory Paganini Concerto No. 1 in D major plus a concerto of their choice. Zhang again chose the Tchaikovsky. He won first prize and €30,000, along with the €3,000 Fondazione Pallavicino Prize for the best performance of a Paganini concerto.

The Paganini package included concert engagements with theatres and musical institutions worldwide and the opportunity to record a studio recital album with the Platoon label. Second prize and €20,000 went to Rino Yoshimoto of Japan; third prize and €10,000 to Kim Hyun Seo of South Korea, the youngest finalist at fifteen. The jury was chaired by Uto Ughi.

On 26 October 2025, the day after the final, Zhang performed at the gala concert with the Orchestra del Teatro Carlo Felice under Philipp von Steinaecker on the 1743 "Il Cannone" by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri — the instrument that belonged to Niccolò Paganini himself and is held by the city of Genoa. The programme paired Dvořák's Symphony No. 8 with the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1. This page carries no first-person quotation from Zhang: a widely repeated line about playing the "Cannone" could not be traced to a confirmed source, and this index does not publish a quotation it cannot attribute.

The two competitions Zhang won in 2025 are separated by fifty-eight years of history and about a thousand kilometres, but they test the same thing in the same way. Both run multiple elimination rounds over one to two weeks, both require a mandatory repertoire alongside a chosen concerto, and both are judged by panels of named international jurors whose composition is published in advance. Neither has an upper bracket that protects a teenager: the Premio Paganini admits players up to thirty, and the Tibor Varga final in 2025 was contested by a seventeen-year-old, a twenty-five-year-old and a twenty-six-year-old.

Classical music prodigy claims are ordinarily hard to evaluate, because most of the evidence is a recital that no one else attended. Competitions of this kind exist precisely to remove that problem: dated finals, published jury lists, orchestral accompaniment, printed programmes and a scoreboard. The Premio Paganini's alumni — Salvatore Accardo, Gidon Kremer, Leonidas Kavakos — also make it one of the very few youth results with a measurable track record attached, which is a different sort of claim from calling a young player exceptional.