Fei-Fei

Piano

Praised for her “bountiful gifts and passionate immersion into the music she touches” (The Plain Dealer), Chinese pianist Fei-Fei is a winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition and a top finalist at the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. She continues to build a reputation for her poetic interpretations, charming audiences with her “passion, piquancy and tenderness” and “winning stage presence” (Dallas Morning News).

Her burgeoning career includes a number of prominent concerto engagements in the 2017-18 season, including performances with the American Symphony Orchestra at the Bard Music Festival, the Buffalo Philharmonic, Long Beach Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Denver Philharmonic, Knoxville Symphony, and a return engagement with California’s Pacific Symphony for a special performance celebrating the Chinese New Year.  This season, Fei-Fei also performs in recital in ten states across the United States as well as nineteen cities in China.

In addition to her summer 2017 performances at the Bard Music Festival, recent festival highlights include Bravo! Vail Valley, Music at Menlo, Busan International Music Festival (Korea), Nantucket Musical Arts Society and the Highlands Chamber Music, Music Mountain and Lake George Music Festivals.

Fei-Fei was showcased prominently as a Cliburn finalist in the documentary film, Virtuosity, about the 2013 Cliburn Competition, which premiered on PBS in August 2015, and she has also been featured numerous times on New York’s WQXR radio.

Career concerto highlights in the US include the Fort Worth Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Spokane Symphony, Corpus Christi Symphony, Austin Symphony, Anchorage Symphony, Youngstown Symphony, and the Juilliard Orchestra.  Internationally, she has performed with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Germany’s Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock, and in China with the Shanxi and Shenzhen Symphony Orchestras.  In December 2016, she performed the world premiere of Shaosheng Li’s piano concerto Behind the Clouds with the China National Symphony at Beijing Concert Hall.  She has worked with such prominent conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Michael Stern, Jeffrey Kahane, Carl St. Clair, Leon Botstein, Randall Craig Fleisher, John Giordano, Yongyan Hu, and En Shao.

Fei-Fei has performed in recital at Alice Tully Hall as the winner of Juilliard’s 33rd Annual William Petschek Recital Award.  Other notable recent recitals in the US include her Weill Recital Hall debut at Carnegie Hall, Gilmore Rising Stars (Kalamazoo, MI), the Smithsonian American Museum in DC, SUNY Purchase Performing Arts Center and The Cliburn’s spring 2015 Chopin Festival, and in Europe at the Auditorio Nacional de Madrid, Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall and the Louvre.

She is a member of the Aletheia Piano Trio, which debuted at the Kennedy Center in February 2014 as part of its Conservatory Project, and performs across the US and in Asia. Deeply committed to sharing her joy for music and connecting with communities, Fei-Fei also engages students and community audiences through frequent school and outreach concerts and master classes.

Born in Shenzhen, China, Fei-Fei began piano lessons at the age of 5. She moved to New York to study at The Juilliard School, where she earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees under the guidance of Yoheved Kaplinsky.