Wang Liang comes home to the oboe

Compared to wind instruments, Chinese audiences are more familiar with the piano and violin, also because China has some musicians who play them internationally, he says, adding that seeing Wang's success, young Chinese musicians may aspire to become oboists.

After 10 years with the New York Philharmonic, Wang is a busy man. Besides four concerts each week with the orchestra, he also teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and New York University.

In the past few years, he has worked with a few Chinese symphony orchestras. He described his collaboration with the Qingdao Symphony Orchestra as a "homecoming".

Born in Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong province, Wang grew up listening to a lot of music: His mother was a singer and his uncle an oboist for the Qingdao Symphony Orchestra.

He learned to play the oboe at 7.

"My apartment is like a factory, which is scattered with tools. The difference between a good reed and a bad one makes all the difference," Wang says of his passion to also make an oboe.

Wang entered the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing when he was 13, and later received a full scholarship to study at the Idyllwild Arts Academy in California.

In 2003, he graduated from the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he was taught by Richard Woodhams, the principal oboist for the Philadelphia Orchestra.

After struggling to find a job in the United States, Wang caught a break with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. Having already played for a symphony orchestra, he auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic in 2006, and was accepted as principal oboist by both.

"New York had always been my dream city. I love the energy there," says Wang, whose apartment is near the Lincoln Center, close to the New York Philharmonic compound.

The New York Philharmonic will perform in Shanghai for the first time next summer.