Hsu, John (Tseng-Hsin)
Hsu, John (Tseng-Hsin)
Hsu, John (Tseng-Hsin), Chinese-born American cellist, viola da gambist, baryton player, and teacher; b. Shantou, April 21, 1931. He emigrated to the U.S. (1949) and became a naturalized American citizen (1961). He studied at Carroll Coll., the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, and the New England Cons, of Music in Boston (B.Mus., 1953; M.Mus., 1955), his teachers including Josef Schroetter, Alfred Zinghera, and Samuel Mayes for cello, and Eugene Lehner and William Kroll for chamber music performance. From 1955 he taught at Cornell Univ., and toured widely as a recitalist. He was a founding member of the Amadé Trio (1972), dedicated to performing early music on original instruments; also in 1972 he joined the Aston Magna Foundation for Music, serving as its artistic director from 1987 to 1990. He was music director of the Apollo Ensemble from 1991. In 1981 he organized the Haydn Baryton Trio for the purpose of playing Haydn’s rarely heard baryton trios. He also ed. the collected works of Marais (1980) and wrote A Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique (1981).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire