Chinese musician Li Biao with his band are entertaining Chinese audiences with their tour, From Baroque to Tango, this week.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Li, of course, won the competition's silver award and $10,000 in cash. The competition also led him to win a three-year fellowship to Munich Conservatory.

Li immersed himself in Europe's rich musical history and culture, learning Western classical percussion instruments and modern music with jazz musicians and symphony orchestras.

In 2003, he joined as faculty of Hanns Eisler College or Academy of Music in Berlin, and two years later, returned to Beijing to establish a percussion instruments' department at Central Conservatory of Music and launched his band. Since then, the band has held some 100 concerts in China and abroad.

"Li is sensitive to music and rhythm, and plays incredibly precise beats," says band member Philip Jungk, who was Li's classmate at Munich Conservatory.

Wang Yue, a percussionist for the China Philharmonic Orchestra and also a former classmate in Beijing, says that Li has done well to promote percussion music in China. Wang plays in Li's band, too.

Other than national and foreign tours, Li's band hosts summer camps for children in Beijing.

"He played various instruments ... to create a wide range of dynamic sounds from harsh to very tender and soft," says renowned conductor Christoph Eschenbach of an earlier concert he had conducted in Beijing, where Li had been featured as a soloist.

In 2010, Li took up the baton of conductor for a Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra show in Nanjing, after the original conductor couldn't make it.

"Music develops in experiments. I had one try, felt good, then I tried a few more times," Li says.

"I can be a percussionist as well as a conductor."

"When I play percussion instruments in an orchestra, I don't need to read the whole score of a symphony. But it is fascinating to read the whole score as you can find more layers of the music," he says, adding that a conductor's job is to bring out different timbres in instruments for an overall balance in the piece being played.

"Different conductor have different interpretations of the same piece."

In the past three years, Li has conducted about 30 orchestras in China, Europe and the United States.

Li likes it all - to play, conduct and teach percussion instruments.