Amy Jiaqi Yang, Piano

Biography

Hailed by Harris Goldsmith of The New York Concert Review as "a magnificent artist and poet: everything she touches turns to gold--a Midas touch for tone and music", twenty-six-year-old pianist Amy Jiaqi Yang is already a seasoned performer and collaborator. A rising star who, “artistically, has fully arrived” (Philadelphia Inquirer), Yang’s performances “elevate joy to the edge of rapture” and “convey the exuberance and enthusiasm of youth” (Star-Telegram).

Most recently, she performed at Marlboro, Caramoor and OKMozart Festivals, Steinway Hall, Perelman Theatre, Marlboro College, on the Dame Myra Hess Series, and in the Van Cliburn Competition. Upcoming performances include a chamber recital at Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall with violinist Hye-Jin Kim, recitals in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Marlboro, San Francisco, and Spain. In the summer, she’ll appear at the festivals of Music In May, OK Mozart, Chamber Music Northwest, and Olympic Music Festival.

Three recordings also expect imminent release: a CD with violinist Chen Xi (Chinese National Record Label) and a live CD and DVD (Itinerant Records) from a tour of Spain with clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester, violinist Jose Blumenschein, and cellist Thomas Carroll. Ms. Yang is also in the process of making her solo debut CD as well as starting The Schumann Project, a series to present Schumann’s complete solo piano and chamber works in the New York area. Commanding an immense repertory, in the recent season she performed works ranging from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, to Beethoven’s Sonata in Bb, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”, and to Ezra Laderman’s Third Piano Sonata.

An experienced performer, Ms. Yang has concertized at The Kennedy Center, The Gardner Museum, The White House, Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, Perelman Theatre, Jones Hall, Bennett-Gordon Hall, The Beinecke Library, Columbia, Miami, and Rockefeller Universities, The New School, Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall (Istanbul), and at The Ravinia Festival and Lubus International Festival of Poland. In 2000, she made her debut at Weill Recital Hall under the auspices of the International Sonatina and Sonata Piano Competition.

An avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with extraordinary artists as Richard Goode, David Soyer, Peter Wiley, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, Ida and Ani Kavafian, Miriam Fried, Ida Levin, Philip Setzer, Judith Serkin, Fred Sherry, Tara Helen O'Conor, Paul Neubauer, Anne-Marie and Kerry McDermott, Marina Piccinini, Cynthia Raim, Joseph Lin, and Kim Kashkashian. In 2007, she toured with Musicians from Ravinia.

Ms. Yang has garnered exclusively first prizes at the International Corpus Christi Young Artists' Competition, the National Chopin Piano Competition of the Kosciuszko Foundation, and the Lennox National Young Artists Competition. She has been a soloist with the Houston Symphony, Connecticut Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, Corpus Christi Symphony, and Richardson Symphony. Festival credits include Prussia Cove, Music Academy of the West, Verbier Academy, Music from Angel Fire, Ravinia Festival, Canandaigua Lake Festival, OK Mozart, and Marlboro Music Festival. An advocate for music education, she performed outreach at The Greenport Music Festival, Music from Angel Fire, New York’s PS11, and schools in California and Spain.

Ms. Yang is graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music, The Juilliard School, and The Yale School of Music, where she received the Parisot Prize for an Outstanding Piano Student as well as the Alumni Association Prize. Her principal teachers are Timothy Hester, Claude Frank, Robert McDonald, and Peter Frankl. She loves drawing, painting, reading, playing classical guitar and chess, studying art history and psychology, and children. Her compositions have been premiered on Juilliard's Double Visions series.