Joyce Yang
Joyce Yang (Korean name 양희원, born 11 April 1986 in Seoul, Korea) is a classical pianist. Yang was awarded the silver medal at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at the age of 19, the youngest competitor there. During the same competition, Joyce was also awarded both the Steven De Groote Memorial Award for Best Performance of Chamber Music, as well as the Beverley Taylor Smith Award for the Best Performance of a New Work.
At age nine, Yang went to New York with her mother and aunt to play for Yoheved Kaplinsky. At age ten she entered the Korean National Conservatory studying under Choong Mo Kang. In 1997 Joyce moved to the United States, and began studying in the Juilliard School's pre-college division with Kaplinsky. While in New York, she attended Ward Melville High School in Suffolk County, while her mother, a molecular biologist, was at SUNY Stony Brook.
As a 16-year-old, she performed with the Millikin-Decatur Symphony Orchestra in 2002, performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. Other engagements by that age had taken place in conjunction with the Baltimore Symphony, the Long Island Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Yang graduated from Juilliard's college division with a bachelor of music degree in 2010 and a special honor, as the recipient of that year's Arthur Rubinstein Prize.
By 2014 she had an increasingly successful career as a soloist and performer of concertos and was also establishing herself as a chamber musician. Her 2014 recordings with the Alexander String Quartet of quintet pieces by Brahms and Schuman were favorably reviewed.
A review by New York Times music critic Zachary Woolfe of Yang's rendition of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1, played in 2014 with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, said that it was a "sumptuous, powerful, subtle performance ... Even her most poundingly virtuosic passages were distinguished by a variety of touch and color, and she was sensitive throughout to the piano’s interactions with the orchestra." A review by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in the same newspaper said of Yang's 2016 performance of the Manuel de Falla composition Nights in the Gardens of Spain with the New York Philharmonic said she gave the solo part in it a "temperamental yet crisp reading ... which was sometimes overwhelmed by colorful but overly loud orchestral playing. Ms. Yang proved especially attuned to the various roles the piano assumed, slipping into the guise of percussionist one moment, only to soften into silky melodic playing the next."
Joyce Yang performed as soloist with the Kansas City Symphony for the world premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff's Piano Concerto in 2019.
She has made a number of appearances with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra.
Locale
- 2019-09-06T00:00:00.000000Z
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