Join Velvet Einstein on Wednesday, March 12th at 4pm when he speaks with Grammy and Emmy Award winning pianist, Gloria Cheng, ahead of her concert at Littlefield Concert Hall on the Mills College campus on March 26th.
Together they will discuss the origins of her release Root Progressions and the differences in working with commissions for Jazz and Classical music.
Over a distinguished and varied career, Gloria Cheng has been described by the New York Times as “an invaluable new-music advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen.”
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 Salonen and Oliver Knussen.
As a recitalist she has appeared at the Ojai Music Festival (where her long association with Boulez began), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and Mendocino and Chautauqua Music Festivals.
Winner of the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) Grammy for her 2008 recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc, The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film-composer documentary, 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. Her much sought-after classes and programs at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music bring students together with noted performers, composers, and scholars.
Photo: Vern Evans
