Music Style: New Music
The Grammy and Emmy Award-winning pianist performs works by Zhou Long, four-hands works by David Lang (joined by David Kaplan), and John Adams’s monumental minimalist masterpiece, the rarely performed “Phrygian Gates.”
PROGRAM
ABOUT THE ARTIST
“An invaluable new-music advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen” [The New York Times], Grammy and Emmy Award-winning pianist GLORIA CHENG has long been devoted to creative collaborations with composers of our time. She has been a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, and on its acclaimed Green Umbrella series with Esa-Pekka Salonen and Oliver Knussen. As a recitalist she has performed at the Ojai Music Festival (where she began her association with Boulez in 1984), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Mendocino, and Chautauqua Music Festivals, and annually on Los Angeles’ Piano Spheres series. She has premiered countless works that include John Williams’ Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Dichotomie (of which she is the dedicatee), and John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction for two pianos (written for her and Grant Gershon). In duo-recitals with the composers, she premiered Thomas Adès’s 2-piano Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face and Terry Riley’s Cheng Tiger Growl Roar. She was awarded the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) GRAMMY for her 2008 recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, and received a second nomination for her 2013 disc, The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film project, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, aired on PBS SoCal and captured a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy. Her education includes a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. She teaches graduate seminars and chamber music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
