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The 26th Annual
Music Festival at Walnut Hill
胡桃山音樂營
July 20 to August
13, 2017 |
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Concerts
and Master Classes
Admission free.
Suggested Donation $5 at door
Saturday, August 12, 2017, 8 PM
at
MIT Kresge, Cambridge, MA
Concerto
Concert
with
Mercury
Orchestra
Channing
Yu,
music director and conductor
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~Program~
Rachmaninoff
Rhapsody on a
Theme of Paganini, Op. 34
Yuhang Li,
piano
(winner of 2017 concerto competition)
~Intermission~
Rachmaninoff
Symphony No. 2,
Op. 27, in E minor
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Steinway piano provided by M. Steinert &
Sons
Meet The Artists |
Yuhang Li,
pianist
Born
in Dalian, China, 17 years old Yuhang Li started his piano
training as a hobby with Ms. Ling Chen at the age of six. Beside
music, he has also explored his other talents such as drawing
and martial arts, and has won gold medal twice in the Hong Kong
International Kungfu Competition. When Yuhang was ten, he
composed his first piece and convinced his parents to support
him on his further music studies. Since then, he had studied
piano with Ms. Yang Yang and Ms. Zhuoyi Li. In 2012, he won the
first place of the 58th Grotrian Steinweg Schumann competition.
Later that year he went to Austria to study with professor
Nikolaus Wiplinger for three months. During that time, 12
year-old Yuhang won the first prize in the 14-16 year-old
division of the European International Music competition of
Moncalieri in Turin, Italy, and was honored with special award
in the competition.
At the age of 13, Yuhang moved to United States to continue his
music training, started with the Walnut Hill Music Festival in
MA. Later in 2014, he attended Piano Texas Music Festival and
performed Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major with Fort
Worth Symphony Orchestra as one of the winners in the concerto
competition. In 2015 he attended Heartland Chamber Music
Festival. He is currently studying with Dr. Matti Raekallio in
the Juilliard School Precollege Division.
Mercury Orchestra
MERCURY ORCHESTRA WINS 2010 AMERICAN PRIZE COMPETITION
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(CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—June 18, 2010) The Mercury Orchestra has
been selected as the national winner of the 2010 American
Prize in Orchestral Performance, community orchestra
division, in a competition including orchestras from 26
states and the District of Columbia.
The American Prize is a series of new non-profit national
competitions designed to recognize and reward the very best
in the performing arts in the United States. Founded in
2009, the American Prize rewards the best recorded
performances of music by individuals and ensembles in the
United States at the professional, community/amateur,
college/university, church and school levels.
The 97-member Mercury Orchestra, directed by the young
American conductor Channing Yu, brings together some of the
most talented amateur musicians in the Cambridge/Boston area
to perform some of the most challenging works in the
symphonic repertoire. Now in its third season, the orchestra
will perform two highly colorful and evocative
works—Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1911) and Berlioz’s Symphonie
fantastique—on July 17 in Sanders Theatre at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In their evaluations, the competition judges praised the
orchestra’s “excellent interpretations” and made special
mention of the orchestra’s “thrilling rendition of the
Rondo-Finale from the Mahler Symphony No. 5,” taken from a
live recording of the orchestra’s performance in July 2009.
”What an incredible honor for the Mercury Orchestra,” says
Maestro Yu, who is also a finalist in the 2010 American
Prize for Conducting competition. “The musicians in our
orchestra are some of the most dedicated, serious, and
expressive artists I have ever worked with, and it is a
thrill to make music together.”
The Bravura Philharmonic Orchestra of West Windsor, N.J.,
took second prize, and the Auburn University/Community
Orchestra of Auburn, Ala., won third prize. The judges’
decision was announced on June 18, 2010, on the American
Prize website, where the three orchestras were congratulated
“for their outstanding achievement, ranked among the finest
community orchestras in the country.”
Justin Albstein, Mercury Orchestra’s general manager, says,
“it’s wonderful that our orchestra has received this
recognition in only its second year. The musicians deserve
tremendous credit for taking on some of the most challenging
pieces in the repertoire and succeeding brilliantly.”
Adds Brian Van Sickle, principal flutist: “This is really an
honor to receive such recognition. What I love most about
playing in this orchestra is how sensitively all of the
players work together and listen to one another. It’s a
thrill to be a part of it all.”
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CHANNING.YU
music.director
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American orchestra and opera conductor Channing Yu is Music
Director of the Mercury Orchestra in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Music Director of Bay Colony Brass in
Watertown, Massachusetts. He is national winner of the 2010
American Prize in Orchestral Conducting in the community
orchestra division.
He has also served as Artistic Director and Conductor of the
Lowell House Opera, the oldest opera company in New England,
where he conducted over thirty fully staged performances
with orchestra, including Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin,
Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Puccini’s Turandot,
Verdi’s Otello, and Puccini’s Tosca. For his musical
direction of Tosca, he was awarded second prize in the 2011
American Prize in Opera Conducting national competition.
His 2013–14 invitational engagements include conducting the
Fall River Symphony Orchestra (Fall River, MA) and Berlin
Sinfonietta (Berlin, Germany), and adjudicating for the
James Pappoutsakis Memorial Flute Competition, the Brookline
Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition, and the Foundation
for Chinese Performing Arts Concerto Competition.
Of the Lowell House Opera’s performance of Otello, The
Harvard Crimson wrote, “The production’s hero was the
orchestra, under the keen direction of Channing Yu. Yu was
able to channel all the energy of the 80-member ensemble
into moments that spanned the entire emotional spectrum—from
sheer joy to complete misery. The sound produced by the
orchestra was stylish, heartfelt, and on the whole,
refined.” The Boston Musical Intelligencer noted, “The real
star of the performance was the orchestra, led with great
skill by Channing Yu.”
He served as guest conductor at the University of North
Carolina, Charlotte, in its 2008 production of Marc-Antoine
Charpentier’s baroque opera Les arts florissants. He guest
conducted the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra in 2008 and
2009. He was invited as one of fourteen conductors worldwide
to work with conductors Neeme Järvi, Leonid Grin, and Paavo
Järvi in master classes at the 2009 Leigo Lakes Music Days
Festival in Estonia. In 2010, he worked with George
Pehlivanian and L’Ensemble Orchestral de València in Spain.
In 2013 he worked with Johannes Schlaefli and conducted the
Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra in Bulgaria.
He began formal study of conducting at Harvard University
with James Yannatos; there he served as assistant conductor
of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and conductor of the
Toscanini Chamber Orchestra. Since then, he has worked with
a number of conductor teachers in the master class setting,
including Kenneth Kiesler, Diane Wittry, Charles Peltz, and
Frank Battisti.
Channing Yu grew up in Pennsylvania. Originally trained as a
pianist, he was a divisional grand prize winner of the
American Music Scholarship Association International Piano
Competition, and he has appeared as piano soloist with
numerous orchestras including the Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra, Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra, Dayton
Philharmonic Orchestra, and Orchèstra Nova. He has been
praised by The Boston Globe for his “imaginative piano
work.” He performs with the chamber ensemble sul ponticello,
in Cambridge, MA. As a violinist, he has served as
concertmaster of the Brahms Society Orchestra and as
violinist in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He was a
founding member of the string quartet Quartetto Periodico.
As a lyric baritone, he has performed with the Boston Opera
Collaborative, in the Richard Crittenden Opera Workshop in
Boston, and in the Neil Semer Vocal Institute in Coesfeld
and Aub, Germany. He also sings with the Tanglewood Festival
Chorus, the Grammy award-winning chorus of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. He is a member of
the faculty of the Powers Music School in Belmont,
Massachusetts. Channing Yu lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. |
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Thank you
for your generous contribution to
Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts
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中華表演藝術基金會
Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts
Lincoln, Massachusetts
updated 2017 |
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