Blessed with “poetic and sensitive pianism” (Washington Post) and a “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice), Grammy-nominated pianist Joyce Yang captivates audiences with her virtuosity, lyricism, and interpretive sensitivity.

She first came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant at 19 years old, she took home two additional awards: Best Performance of Chamber Music (with the Takàcs Quartet), and Best Performance of a New Work. In 2006 Yang made her celebrated New York Philharmonic debut alongside Lorin Maazel at Avery Fisher Hall before joining the orchestra’s tour of Asia, making a triumphant return to her hometown of Seoul, South Korea. Yang’s subsequent appearances with the New York Philharmonic have included the opening night of the 2008 Leonard Bernstein Festival – an appearance made at the request of Maazel in his final season as music director. The New York Times pronounced her performance in Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety a “knockout.” 

In the last decade, Yang has blossomed into an “astonishing artist” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), showcasing her colorful musical personality in solo recitals and collaborations with the world’s top orchestras and chamber musicians through more than 1,000 debuts and re-engagements. She received the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant. She earned her first Grammy nomination (Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance) for her recording of Franck, Kurtág, Previn & Schumann with violinist Augustin Hadelich. (“One can only sit in misty-eyed amazement at their insightful flair and spontaneity.” – The Strad)

Notable orchestral engagements have included the Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the BBC Philharmonic, as well as the Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras. She was also featured in a five-year Rachmaninoff concerto cycle with Edo de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony, to which she brought “an enormous palette of colors, and tremendous emotional depth” (Milwaukee Sentinel Journal).

In solo recital, Yang’s innovative program has been praised as “extraordinary” and “kaleidoscopic” (Los Angeles Times). She has performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and Zurich’s Tonhalle. In 2018, Musica Viva presented Yang in an extensive recital tour throughout Australia.

As an avid chamber musician, Yang has collaborated with many renowned string quartets, such as the Guarinari, Takács, Emerson, and the Pacifica String Quartets, and has fostered an enduring partnership with the Alexander String Quartet. After releasing two highly celebrated disc of Brahms and Schumann Quintets and the Mozart’s Piano Quartets (“by far, hands down and feet up, the most amazing performances of Mozart’s two piano quartets that have ever graced these ears” Fanfare Magazine), they completed a tour of North America in the 2018/2019 season performing Quintet with Pillars by Samuel Carl Adams, a newly commissioned work composed for the quartet and Yang to celebrate their 10 years of collaboration. 

Yang’s wide-ranging discography includes the world premiere recording of Michael Torke’s Piano Concerto, created expressly for Yang and commissioned by the Albany Symphony. Yang has also “demonstrated impressive gifts” (New York Times) with the release of Wild Dreams (Avie Records), on which she plays Schumann, Bartók, Hindemith, Rachmaninoff, and arrangements by Earl Wild. She recorded Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Denmark’s Odense Symphony Orchestra that International Record Review called “hugely enjoyable, beautifully shaped … a performance that marks her out as an enormous talent.” Of her 2011 debut album for Avie Records, Collage, featuring works by Scarlatti, Liebermann, Debussy, Currier, and Schumann, Gramophone praised her “imaginative programming” and “beautifully atmospheric playing.” 

In 2019/2020, Yang shares her versatile repertoire in over 70 engagements throughout America and Australia. She appears as a soloist with St. Louis, Dallas, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Pacific, Fort Worth, Utah, Rhode Island, Minas Gerais, New World Symphony, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, among others, and presents solo recitals in Boston (Celebrity Series), St. Paul (Chopin Society), and Rochester, NY (Eastman School of Music). As an advocate of new music, she will give a world premiere performance with Kansas City Symphony in the fall of 2019 of Jonathan Leshnoff’s piano concerto written expressly for her.

Yang is passionate about promoting creative ways to introduce classical music to new audiences. She was the Guest Artistic Director for the 2019 Laguna Beach Music Festival in California, curating concerts that explore the “art-inspires-art” concept – highlighting the relationship between music, literature, and dance while simultaneously curating outreach activities to young students. This season, Yang continues her cross-disciplinary project with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet with performances of Half/Cut/Split – a “witty, brilliant exploration of Robert Schumann’s Carnaval” (The Santa Fe New Mexican) choreographed by Jorma Elo – a marriage between music and dance to illuminate the ingenuity of Schumann’s musical language.

Born in 1986 in Seoul, South Korea, Yang received her first piano lesson from her aunt at the age of four. She quickly took to the instrument, which she received as a birthday present, and over the next few years won several national piano competitions in her native country. By the age of ten, she entered the School of Music at the Korea National University of Arts and made a number of concerto and recital appearances in Seoul and Daejeon. In 1997, Yang moved to the United States to begin studies at the pre-college division of The Juilliard School with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky. During her first year at Juilliard, Yang won the pre-college division Concerto Competition, resulting in a performance of Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto in D with the Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Orchestra. After winning the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with that orchestra at just twelve years old. She graduated from Juilliard with the special honor of receiving the school’s 2010 Arthur Rubinstein Prize, and in 2011 she won its 30th Annual William A. Petschek Piano Recital Award.

In the film In the Heart of Music, Yang appears in the film about the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. She is a Steinway artist.

Violinist Lorenz Gamma has a varied career as a soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and teacher. He is the founder and artistic director of the Borromeo Music Festival (www.borromeomusicfestival.org) in Switzerland. The festival consists of a two-week summer course for advanced string and piano students and hosts faculty members from many internationally renowned music schools such as the New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University in Bloomington, the Royal Academy of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, and many others.

Mr. Gamma spent three years concertizing full-time with the Amar Quartet, with performances in many of Europe’s most important chamber music venues, including the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Victoria Hall in Geneva, the Residenz in Munich, the Cologne Philharmonic, as well as many other venues in cities such as London, Paris, New York etc. With his quartet, he won the Millennium Award at the 2000 London International String Quartet Competition and several other prizes.

Prior to his activity with the quartet, Mr. Gamma served as concertmaster of the Northwest Sinfonietta in Seattle and as principal of the Zurich Opera orchestra. As a soloist, Mr. Gamma has performed over twenty different concertos by Bach, Beethoven, Berg, Brahms, Bruch, Gubaidulina, Lutoslawski, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Piazzolla, Rubinstein, Schumann, Spohr, Tartini, Vivaldi, and Wieniawski.

As a chamber musician, he has performed string quartets by over sixty composers, as well as the greater part of the standard chamber literature of over eighty composers. Musicians he collaborated with include Sophia Gubaidulina, Heinz Holliger, Paul Katz, Ronald Leonard, Thea Musgrave, Roger Reynolds, Donald McInnes, Joseph Silverstein, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, and many others.

Mr. Gamma lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of violin at California State University Northridge (CSUN), where he also serves as head of strings and director of the chamber music program. His private and professional violin students have regularly gone on to continue their studies at such institutions as the Juilliard School, Indiana University, the Manhattan and Eastman Schools of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the University of Southern California, and the Colburn School in Los Angeles.

Lorenz Gamma was born in Switzerland, where he received his initial training as a violinist at the conservatory in Lucerne. His further studies took place in the United States, with Franco Gulli, Steven Staryk, and Mark Kaplan.

Dr. Dmitry Rachmanov is Chair of Keyboard Studies at California State University, Northridge. A sought-after performer, master class clinician, adjudicator, and lecturer, Dr. Rachmanov has served on the faculties of Manhattan School of Music and Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and has been a guest artist/lecturer/clinician at The Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, Eastman School of Music, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai and Beijing Central Conservatories.

Rachmanov has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, London's Barbican and South Bank Centres, at venues across Europe and Asia, and has collaborated as a soloist with the Ukraine National Symphony, National Orchestra of Porto, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, and San Luis Obispo Symphony, among others. He has recorded for Naxos, Parma, Master Musicians, and Vista Vera labels.

An active member of the American Liszt Society, Dmitry Rachmanov served as the Artistic Director of the 2016 ALS Festival “Liszt and Russia” hosted by Cal State Northridge. He is the president of the society’s Southern California chapter.

A proponent of Russian repertoire, Rachmanov gave the US premiere of Boris Pasternak Piano Sonata, broadcast by the NPR, and his recital "The Art of the 19th Century Russian Character Piece" was noted by The New York Times for "considerable color and focus" he brought to each work. He is a founding member of the Scriabin Society of America; his April 2014 Scriabin program at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, part of the world recital tour commemorating Scriabin’s 100^th memorial anniversary, was described as “a ‘poem of ecstasy’ in every sense: giant in conception, quantity, quality, execution, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity” by the New York Concert Review. He has since embarked on a project of recording a video anthology of Alexander Scriabin’s piano works.

Dr. Rachmanov is a graduate of The Juilliard School (BM & MM) and Manhattan School of Music (DMA). His teachers include Nadia Reisenberg, Arkady Aronov, Alexander Eydelman, and Ada Traub. He is a recipient of numerous awards, among them “Jerome Richfield Memorial Scholar” at CSUN and receiving an “Outstanding CAPMT Member State Recognition Award” by the California Association of Professional Music Teachers. In 2018 Dr. Rachmanov was selected as the 2018-19 Academic Affairs Research Fellow in the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication at CSUN. In January 2019, he was a Co-Director of the ChamberFest @ CSUN Festival, with its sequel scheduled for January 2021. In the summer of 2019, he was a resident at the Brahmshouse in Baden-Baden, Germany.