The Mentoring Series at National Sawdust:
Garrick Ohlsson and Eric Lu
Wednesday, February 15th @ 7pm
Tickets
Eric Lu
19-year-old pianist Eric Lu is rapidly building an international reputation as a young pianist with enormous promise and a distinctive musical voice.
A native of the Boston, Massachusetts area, Eric is the 1st prize winner of the IX Moscow International Chopin Competition for Young Pianists and the 2015 National Chopin Competition in Miami, USA, where he also received the best concerto prize. In October 2015, at 17 years old, Eric won the 4th prize at the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw, becoming one of the youngest laureates in the history of the competition. Earlier achievements include 1st prizes at both the XII Ettlingen International Competition in Germany(2010) and the Minnesota International e-Piano Junior Competition(2013). Described by the New York Classical Review as a musician of “exceptional musical sensitivity,” as well as by Michael Moran from the Duszniki Festival proclaiming: “the tone he produced was luminous, the articulation spellbinding and exciting, the legato and bel canto desperately moving.” He received further recognition by the public, winning the Tabor Foundation Piano Award at the Verbier Festival Academy 2015.
With his concert life being very fresh and new, he has already received compelling responses by audiences worldwide to the unique beauty and intensity of the music he plays. Upcoming performances include recital and concerto appearances at the Auditorio Nacional Madrid, Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, Boston Jordan Hall, Nohant Chopin Festival, Krakow Music Festival, Seoul Arts Center, Sapporo Concert Hall, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, among others. Highlights of the 2015-16 season included a recital at Carnegie Hall in New York, at the 70th International Chopin Festival in Duszniki-Zydrój, Poland, and at Beijing Concert Hall in China. Eric has collaborated with orchestras such as the Warsaw Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, State Youth Orchestra of Armenia, Chopin Foundation Orchestra, etc.
He started piano studies at the age of 6 with Mrs. Dorothy Shi near Boston, MA. While at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School, he studied piano with Alexander Korsantia and Mr. A. Ramón Rivera. In 2013, Eric entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he currently studies with Profs. Jonathan Biss and Robert McDonald. He is also a pupil of the pianist Dang Thai Son.
About the Show
This concert features Chopin Competition Finalist Eric Lu and his mentor Garrick Ohlsson.
Eric’s Program
Schubert Impromptus Op. 90 No. 2 & 3
Prokofiev Sonata No. 7, Op. 83
Garrick Ohlsson
Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Mr. Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire, which ranges over the entire piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Mr. Ohlsson has come to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, as well as the Romantic repertoire. To date he has at his command more than 80 concertos, ranging from Haydn and Mozart to works of the 21st century, many commissioned for him. This season that vast repertoire can be sampled in concerti ranging from Rachmaninoff’s popular Third and rarely performed Fourth, to Brahms Nos. 1 and 2, Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg and Copland in cities including Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, Miami, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Liverpool, and Madrid ending with a spring US West Coast tour with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic conducted by Yuri Temirkanov. In recital he can be heard in LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, New York, New Orleans, Hawaii and Prague.
A frequent guest with the orchestras in Australia, Mr. Ohlsson has recently visited Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart as well as the New Zealand Symphony in Wellington and Auckland. An avid chamber musician, Mr. Ohlsson has collaborated with the Takacs, Cleveland, Emerson, and Tokyo string quartets, among other ensembles. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier, he is a founding member of the San Francisco-based FOG Trio. Passionate about singing and singers, Mr. Ohlsson has appeared in recital with such legendary artists as Magda Olivero, Jessye Norman, and Ewa Podles.
Mr. Ohlsson can be heard on the Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, BMG, Delos, Hänssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, Hyperion and Virgin Classics labels. His ten-disc set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas, for Bridge Records, has garnered critical acclaim, including a GRAMMY® for Vol. 3. His recording of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3, with the Atlanta Symphony and Robert Spano, was released in 2011. In the fall of 2008 the English label Hyperion re-released his 16-disc set of the Complete Works of Chopin followed in 2010 by all the Brahms piano variations, “Goyescas” by Enrique Granados, and music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Most recently on that label are Scriabin’s Complete Poèmes, Smetana Czech Dances, and ètudes by Debussy, Bartok and Prokofiev. The latest CDs in his ongoing association with Bridge Records are “Close Connections,” a recital of 20th-Century pieces, and two CDs of works by Liszt with Scriabin complete sonatas due for release this season. In recognition of the Chopin bicentenary in 2010, Mr. Ohlsson was featured in a documentary “The Art of Chopin” co-produced by Polish, French, British and Chinese television stations. Most recently, both Brahms concerti and Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto were released on live performance recordings with the Melbourne and Sydney Symphonies on their own recording labels, and Mr. Ohlsson was featured on Dvorak’s piano concerto in the Czech Philharmonic’s live recordings of the composer’s complete symphonies & concertos, released July of 2014 on the Decca label.
A native of White Plains, N.Y., Garrick Ohlsson began his piano studies at the age of 8, at the Westchester Conservatory of Music; at 13 he entered The Juilliard School, in New York City. His musical development has been influenced in completely different ways by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhévinne and Irma Wolpe. Although he won First Prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montréal Piano Competition, it was his 1970 triumph at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, where he won the Gold Medal (and remains the single American to have done so), that brought him worldwide recognition as one of the finest pianists of his generation. Since then he has made nearly a dozen tours of Poland, where he retains immense personal popularity. Mr. Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, MI. He is also the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. He makes his home in San Francisco.
