MTD Events
Guest Artist Recital: Oliver Jia, piano
Date and Time
Wednesday, November 9, 2022 7:30 PM
Location
Sherman van Solkema Recital Hall
Haas Center for Performing Arts
Description
Described as an artist with “incomparable color and beauty of sound”
(Jan Popis, Chopin
Gazeta: 2005), Swedish-American pianist Oliver
Jia has performed for audiences all over the
world, and actively
appears in concerts on three major continents. With a repertoire of
dozens of
concerti in addition to over two hundred solo and
chamber works, Oliver made his official debut
at Isaac Stern
Auditorium in Carnegie Hall under the baton of the late Maestro James
DePreist,
performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 5 with
the Juilliard Orchestra.
As a testament to his wide-ranging performance career, Oliver has
performed with the Orchestra
of St Luke’s, the Fort Worth
Symphony, the China National Symphony, and the Juilliard
Orchestra, among others. He has made solo and concerti appearances at
Alice Tully Hall at
Lincoln Center, the Warsaw Philharmonic
Concert Hall, Royal Dublin Society, and the
Manhattan Center, as
well as the premier concert halls in mainland China. Other notable
events
include performance tours and interviews in northern Italy
(Bologna, Senigallia), China
(numerous cities, including Beijing,
Nanjing, Suzhou, Yangzhou), North Carolina Triangle Area
(chamber
concerts in Raleigh, Durham, etc) as well as individual recitals in
Warsaw, Stockholm,
Dublin, Hastings, and other European cities.
In addition to his solo engagements, Oliver is an engaged chamber
musician and has collaborated
with numerous chamber ensembles,
especially in the US region. He is also busy as a
collaborative pianist, and has accompanied numerous string, woodwind,
and vocal musicians in
various projects. As a teacher, Oliver has
maintained a private studio for two decades, teaching
both solo
piano and chamber music. From 2017-2019, he was a member of the piano
faculty at
the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.
Finally, Oliver is strongly involved in musical research. As part of
his doctoral dissertation,
Oliver presented a two-hour lecture
recital on the complete set of Frédéric Chopin’s monumental
Études, complete with a performance and a talk on the subject. In
addition, he has written several
research papers; these pertain to
unique aspects in musicology that focus on topics not often
featured in the mainstream of academia publications. These include
“Josquin des Prez: A Study
in Counterpoint” (New Haven, CT. 2014),
“Transcriptions: The Piano as a Broadcasting
Instrument” (New
York, NY. 2012), and “War of the Romantics: Artistic Ideals in
Conflict” (New
York, NY. 2006).
Oliver was born in Nanking to a family with significant music
backgrounds (his grandparents
served as distinguished Peking Opera
directors for decades), and spent his entire childhood in
Stockholm. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The
University of Michigan, an
Artist Diploma from Yale University,
and Master of Music & Bachelor of Music degrees from
The
Juilliard School. His major instructors have included Logan Skelton,
Peter Frankl, Jerome
Lowenthal, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Oxana
Yablonskaya, and Paul van Ness.
Oliver has served as Assistant Professor of Piano at Bilkent University since 2019.
This event also appears on the main events calendar tagged as 55andupalumni, concert, music, and performance.
Contact
Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance