The Bollywood String Quartet is renowned for its professional standards and first-class performances. Its musicians have all received the highest standard of classical training, having respectively achieved 2 Master's degrees and 2 Bachelor degrees in Music from the prestigious Birmingham Conservatoire. After earning a fine reputation for their classical playing, in 2008 the string quartet expanded. In addition to the traditional repertoire of the String Quartet Birmingham, they now also perform Indian Bollywood style music, under the name of Kiki’s Bollywood Strings called after their current leader Kiki Chen.
Kiki Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She started piano lessons at age 4 and began to learn to play the violin at age 8. In 2006 she came to the UK to continue her musical education with a scholarship at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where she studied under the prestigious CBSO leader Laurence Jackson.
She has received much acclaim for her playing. She was the recipient of the 2006 Herbert Lumby Prize for violinists, finalist of the 2007 Sylvia Cleaver Chamber Prize and in the same year was accepted onto the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra training scheme. She later joined the rock band “The Love Child Electric”, who have since successfully released their album “Lovers, Thinkers and Fakers” (available on iTunes).
She has performed at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, Town Hall, National Indoor Arena, MAC, Adrian Boult Hall, Longborough Opera Festival, Birmingham ArtFest and in Battle Proms across the UK. Whilst touring with orchestras, she has performed in New York, Boston, Washington, Toronto, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Africa and Swaziland.
Her performance at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival was described by The Independent, 9 May 2010 as “inspiring, wildly creative music of avant-garde bite yet emotional weight … handled the difficult idioms with great skill”.
More recently, she was invited to perform at the House of Lords for the 2010 Mumbai Memorial, for which her playing was highly praised by Members of the House and guests; this lead to a performance earlier this year at the 2011 UK Asian Music Awards, Round House, London.
