Friday, February 28th, 2025, 7:30 pm @ Scandinavia House
Piano on Park Live presents:
Han Chen - piano
Online Tickets $30 + fee
At Door Tickets $35
Program:
Chopin: Fantasie-Impromptu (1834)
Price: Fantasie Nègre in E minor (1929)
Lei Liang: Book of Time I (2023)* world premiere
(Intermission)
Schumann: Fantasiestücke, Op. 12 (1837)
Scriabin: Fantasy in B minor, Op. 28 (1900)
About:
A fearless performer with seemingly limitless imagination and possessed with uncanny energy, pianist Han Chen plays scores old and new with rare rigor and insight.
Alex Ross, classical music critic of The New Yorker, who selected Mr. Chen’s Naxos disc of the Ligeti Études and Capriccios as a “Notable Classical Recording of 2023,” characterized him as follows: “The Taiwanese pianist Han Chen, a noted interpreter of the Ligeti Études and other modernist repertory, has made a blistering album of the [Liszt] opera transcriptions.” –The New Yorker, September 4, 2023
Attending “Infinite Staircase,” Mr. Chen’s recent traversal of the 18 Ligeti Etudes and 18 accompanying world premieres, George Grella titled his review: “Han Chen’s remarkable playing equal to the genius of Ligeti’s Etudes” and went on to exclaim:
...he was astonishing, with some of the finest pianism one has ever witnessed. Beyond sheer dexterity, this was tremendously musical playing, with every phrase clear and pointed in a certain direction, fluid control of dynamics and form, a combination of articulation and force that was hard to believe. One had the feeling that Chen was deep inside the work, opening up every detail of Ligeti’s musical personality. His energy and stamina within each Étude and through the whole concert were extraordinary.
—New York Classical Review, September 25, 2023
Reviewing this event in I Care If You Listen, Lana Norris summarized it as a “marathon of canonical music and new works that displayed exquisite programming, stupendous technique, and forward-thinking expansion of classical music’s best traditions.” —September 28, 2023
Gold Medalist at the 2013 China International Piano Competition and a prizewinner at the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition, Mr. Chen has also been praised by Gramophone as “impressively com-manding and authoritative” and further cited by The New York Times for his “graceful touch,” “rhythmic precision” and “hypnotic charm.”
Mr. Chen’s musical vision is manifest in his four solo Naxos CDs focusing on Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Thomas Adès, and György Ligeti’s Complete Piano Études. Reviewing the Ligeti recording in the August 2023 issue of Gramophone, Jed Distler wrote:
[He is] one of the few pianists who handles both gnarly contemporary scores and over-the-top Romantic showpieces with equal authority and style...he surmounts the sophisticated rhythmic challenges of Ligeti's Études to a T, while infusing them with plenty of tonal allure and personality. Chen aims for clarity and balance over sheer speed, yielding steadier results and more cogent interplay between the hands. Within the gorgeous expanding and contracting textures of 'Cordes à vide,' Han makes expressive points through voicing and hand balance alone...[and exhibits] meticulous and consistent détaché/sostenuto differentiation throughout 'Fanfares.' He patiently spins out the shifting rhythmic patterns of 'Entrelacs' as if the keyboard were an expansive and seamless canvas.
Mr. Chen is equally a powerful performer of the classic piano repertoire. Reviewing Mr. Chen performing Beethoven’s Sonata No. 29 Op. 106 Hammerklavier, Lee Eiseman of The Boston Music Intelligencer had this to say:
Oxygenated by powerful intellectual bellows and endowed with muscular forearms, Chen didn’t just hammer Beethoven’s formidably relentless and ever-modern challenge to pianists and listeners; with fire and tempering plunges he alternately annealed, welded, sintered, and sensitively stretched the well-wrought iron into impressive curls and shapely forms. His carefully plotted interpretations conveyed nuance and compelling gesture through very well-graduated colorations and dynamics from white hot to warmly glowing. No two repeated chords sounded the same. Chen’s Beethoven seemed to anticipate Berg and Ligeti on this night.
—August 19, 2023
He has appeared as soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Lexington Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, China Symphony Orchestra, and Xiamen Philharmonic. In December 2022 he made his Lincoln Center debut with Riverside Symphony at Alice Tully Hall performing Mozart’s early masterwork, the Piano Concerto No. 9, le Jeunehomme. Mr. Chen has performed as solo recitalist internationally. In demand as a chamber musician, he is a core member of Ensemble Échappé while regularly collaborating with The Metropolis Ensemble. In 2021, Chen launched Migration Music, an ongoing series of performances and interviews with immigrant composers.
Han Chen has studied with Yoheved Kaplinsky, Wha Kyung Byun, and Ursula Oppens at The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, and CUNY Graduate Center. He is represented by Black Tea Music.
Website: https://www.hanchenpiano.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hanchenpiano
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/hanchenpiano
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hanchenpiano
About Lei Liang and A Book of Time I:
"A Book of Time I is about listening to the earth’s own harmonies hidden in rocks. Rocks are made of different minerals that deform at different speeds, experiencing time differently. Some rocks from deep within Earth are brought to the surface in a violent eruption at supersonic speed. This extremely rapid transport process preserves the information these rocks record and helps us understand the inaccessible regions of the planet. Each rock is a book of time. Our team (Lei Lab, launched in 2023) developed the idea and technology to use X-ray fluorescence analysis of minerals to trace a series of data points delineating their elemental peaks."
Using this data, Liang and his collaborators transformed the elemental signatures of minerals into corresponding harmonies which in turn were shaped through the composer’s inspiration into a musical piece for solo piano — essentially letting the earth "sing" through the piano.
Heralded as "one of the most exciting voices in New Music" by The Wire magazine, Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as "hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful" by the New York Times, and as "far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous" by the Washington Post.
The winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto for saxophone and orchestra, Xiaoxiang, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Arditti Quartet, the Shanghai Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, and pipa virtuoso Wu Man. Lei Liang's thirteen portrait discs are released on Naxos, New World, Mode, Albany, Encounter, BMOP/sound and Bridge Records. As a scholar and conservationist of cultural traditions, he edited and co-edited eight books and editions, and published more than fifty articles.
From 2013-2016, Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine cultural heritage through combining scientific research and advanced technology. In 2018, Liang returned to the Institute as its inaugural Research Artist-in-Residence. In 2023, the Institute launched "Lei Lab" where he continues to collaborate with engineers, geologists, oceanographers and software developers, to explore what he calls "the unique potential for learning offered by creative listening."
Lei Liang's recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America's complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs.
Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (B.M. and M.M.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships. Lei Liang serves as the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. His catalogue of more than a hundred compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music.