BY KAREN BOSSICK
Grammy-nominated Pianist Joyce Yang will headline and serve as guest curator of the Sun Valley Music Festival’s seventh Winter Season.
The free-admission Winter Season will take place at 7 p.m. March 6-8 at the Argyros Performing Arts Center in Ketchum, with the program presented three times. Yang will join forces with Festival Orchestra musicians for a chamber program of music from Poulenc, Dohnanyi and Schumann.
Yang will also perform solo piano works by Sergei Rachmaninoff--Op. 32, No. 12 in G-sharp Minor: Allegro; Op. 32, No. 10 in B Minor: Lento; Op. 23, No. 4 in D Major: Andante cantabile, and Op. 32, No. 13 in D-flat Major: Grave.
The general public can reserve two seats per household beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 5 online at https://www.svmusicfestival.org/. Festival donors at the $6,000 level and up may reserve seats beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 29, by calling the Festival office at 208-622-5607.
Yang is a Sun Valley Music Festival favorite, having performed several times with Music Director Alasdair Neale and the Festival Orchestra during past Summer Seasons. An internationally renowned soloist and chamber musician, she was 19 when she rose to fame in 2005 as the youngest contestant and silver medalist at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano competition.
She also took home Best Performance of Chamber Music and Best Performance of a New Work awards, and she made her New York Philharmonic debut in 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall.
The Steinway artist previously appeared at the Festival’s Summer Seasons in 2021, performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2; in 2016, when she played Gershwin’s Piano concerto in F Major, and in 2013 when she performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
She has been praised by the Washington Post for her “poetic and sensitive pianism,” by the San Francisco Classical Voice for her “wondrous sense of color” and by Neue Zurcher Zeitung as “an astonishing artist.”
“It’s a privilege to welcome Joyce back to Sun Valley, this time in the winter and on the intimate stage of the Argyros,” said Neale. “She has assembled an eclectic and intriguing program that she feels a special connection to. I’m particularly looking forward to her chamber music collaborations with our musicians, since her intensely sensitive and communicative style of music-making lends itself exceptionally well to that genre.”
Yang will be joined by Andrea Kaplan on flute, Erik Behr on oboe, Jason Shafer on clarinet, Andrew Cuneo on bassoon and Catherine Turner on horn for Francis Poulenc’s Sextet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon and Piano. She will be joined by Shawn Weil on violin, Adam Smyla on viola, and Emileigh Vandiver on cello for Ernst von Dohnanyi’s Serenade in C Major for Violin, Viola and Cello.
And she will be joined by Jeremy Constant on violin, Marylene Gingras-Roy on viola and Amos Yang on cello for Robert Schumann’s Quartet in E-flat Major for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello.
The Winter Season concerts will last about two hours, including an intermission.
They will be preceded on March 5 with an Upbeat with Alasdair featuring Neale and Yang in conversation at Ketchum’s Community Library. Reservations for the 5:30 p.m. talk will be taken beginning 9 a.m. Feb. 19. The program also will be livestreamed on the Music Festival website.
Yang and Winter Festival musicians also plan to offer demonstrations, coaching and master classes in local schools during the week of the Winter Festival.