Lauren Zhang – SJE Arts International Piano Series

Tickets £5 - £25, can be booked soon via the SJE Arts website.

Season tickets and concession tickets available too.

Free tickets are offered to Faculty of Music members on production of valid ID.

Rossini Prélude inoffensif (Péchés de vieillesse, vol 7 Album de chaumière)
Schumann Sonata No.1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 11
Interval
Lowell Liebermann Gargoyles, Op. 29
Schumann Humoreske, Op. 20

In 2018, Lauren Zhang was crowned BBC Young Musician of the Year with a performance of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. She was sixteen at the time and was praised for her outstanding maturity. Since then, solo appearances include her debuts at the Royal Albert Hall and at Herkulesaal, Munich and concertos with China National Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the London Mozart Players, to name but a few.

Lauren opens her programme with one of Rossini’s short piano pieces from the collection he jokingly titled ‘Péchés de vieillesse’ (Sins of old age). Schumann follows; his music was always a reflection of his personal life and this sonata, composed when his beloved Clara had been sent away by her father, is no exception. It was, he later told Clara, ‘a solitary outcry for you from my heart …in which your theme appears in every possible shape’.

Post-interval, Lauren introduces us to Gargoyles, a 4-movement neo-romantic piano suite by the American composer Lowell Liebermann. Premiered at Alice Tully Hall, New York City, in October 1989, the title ‘Gargoyles’ refers to the overall mood of the piece, a riveting combination of the humorous and the sinister.

Also available
Season Tickets for all nine concerts in the 2024 Series at a 20% discount.