“Steinway pianos allow me to transform my ideas into life. It is crucial that I play on Steinway in my most important concerts because no other piano can speak my most profound emotions. Every instrument has a personality and Steinway allows me to create infinite colors and textures in music.”
Joyce Yang
Pianist Joyce Yang 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 also took home the awards for Best Performance of Chamber Music and of a New Work. A Steinway artist, in 2010 Yang received an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Yang has performed with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, and the Chicago, Houston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Sydney symphony orchestras, among many others, working with such distinguished conductors as James Conlon, Edo de Waart, Lorin Maazel, Peter Oundjian, David Robertson, Leonard Slatkin, Bramwell Tovey, and Jaap van Zweden. She has appeared in recital at New York’s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum, Washington’s Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and Zurich’s Tonhalle.
Yang kicks off the 2015/16 season with a tour of eight summer festivals (Aspen, Seattle, and Bravo! Vail among them) before embarking on a steady stream of debuts, returns, and chamber music concerts. She reunites with the New York Philharmonic under Tovey for a five-date engagement of Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain; makes her New Jersey Symphony debut with Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in an evening celebrating the orchestra’s season finale and Music Director Jacque Lacombe’s last concert with the company; performs and records the world premiere of Michael Torke’s Piano Concerto, a piece created expressly for her and commissioned by the Albany Symphony; and plays Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Melbourne Symphony in Australia in yet another triumphant return. Additional appearances showcasing her vast repertoire include performances with the Colorado Springs, Orlando, and Reading Philharmonics, and the Alabama, Anchorage, Corpus Christi, Greenwich, Milwaukee, Nashville, Pasadena, Princeton, Santa Fe, Utah, and Vancouver symphonies.
Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1986, Yang received her first piano lesson from her aunt at age four. In 1997 she moved to the United States to begin studies at the pre-college division of the Juilliard School. After winning the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with that orchestra at just twelve years old. Yang appears in the film In the Heart of Music, a documentary about the 2005 Cliburn Competition. Joyce Yang is a Steinway Artist.