Joyce Yang’s Whirlwind Summer

Pianist Joyce Yang spent the Fourth of July packing for two straight months on the summer festival circuit, mere days after performing concertos in Asia, and with no respite from her red-letter spring. Following her Alice Tully Hall recital debut at Lincoln Center in May, she jumped in for an ill Yuja Wang as soloist in Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the NAC Orchestra. The Ottawa Citizen described Yang's performance as "gripping." In June the 25-year-old Korean-American recorded her debut album, Collage, to be released this fall by Avie.

First in Yang’s high-profile appearances this summer is the Aspen Music Festival where she performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with Jaap van Zweden and the Music Festival Orchestra (July 10), and plays a recital with violinist Stefan Jackiw (July 16). She is soloist in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Russian National Orchestra at the Festival del Sole in Napa (July 24) and at Brevard (July 29), and joins artistic director Anne-Marie McDermott at Bravo! Vail Valley for a “Two Piano Extravaganza” (Aug. 3).

Yang makes her debut at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in recital (August 9) and plays a quartet of chamber music concerts, including the premiere of Marc-André Dalbavie's Piano Quartet with the Orion String Quartet (August 10-14). She reprises the Dalbavie at La Jolla SummerFest and joins the Tokyo String Quartet for music by Cynthia Lee Wong (August 16-21). For a look at Joyce Yang’s glittering fingerwork, view this YouTube clip of a rehearsal of the Tchaikovsky Concerto with Edo de Waart in Hong Kong last month.