Fei-Fei Dong won the hearts of Bay Area classical music fans this summer at Music@Menlo, and we’re proud to be bringing her back for a solo concert this October. This delightful Julliard graduate, top finalist at the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and a featured artist in the Cliburn documentary “Virtuosity,” is praised for her “bountiful gifts and passionate immersion into the music she touches” (The Plain Dealer).

Chinese pianist Fei-Fei Dong, winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, 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 including performances with the Anchorage Symphony, Spokane Symphony, DuPage Symphony (IL) and a special concert with the Pacific Symphony. On the international stage she has appeared at Spain’s Auditorio Nacional de Madrid, and in Shenzhen, China and Nantucket, MA, as well as a concerto with Germany’s Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock.

Career concerto highlights in the US include the Fort Worth Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, , and the Juilliard Orchestra, and in China with the Shanxi and Shenzhen Symphony Orchestras. She has worked with such prominent conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Michael Stern, Jeffrey Kahane, Randall Craig Fleisher, and John Giordano.

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) and The Cliburn’s spring 2015 Chopin Festival, and in Europe at 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. 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.

B. Galuppi was an Italian composer who belonged to a generation of composers, including Gluck, Domenico Scarlatti and CPE Bach, whose works are emblematic of the galant style that prevailed in Europe throughout the 18th century. He was highly regarded as a virtuoso performer on and composer for keyboard instruments. Napoleon’s invasion of Venice in 1797 resulted in Galuppi’s manuscripts being scattered around Western Europe, and in many cases, destroyed or lost. In the latter half of the 19th century, his music was largely forgotten outside of Italy. Some of Galuppi’s works were occasionally performed in the 200 years after his death, but not until the last years of the 20th century were his compositions extensively revived in live performance and recordings.

This delightful cycle was the first of Schumann’s piano cycles rooted in literature. At this early stage of his career – he was 19 – music and literature were inseparable for him. His principal literary model was the novelist Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, pen name Jean Paul. Schumann’s favorite novel was his Flegeljahre, the tale of a poetic soul in search of life’s meaning. Its penultimate chapter takes place at a masked ball. Schumann’s original concept was a linked series of ten small pieces inspired in part by the masked ball. The chiming clock at the end supports this interpretation. Eventually he expanded the work to twelve movements, adding an allusion to the opening waltz in the finale. In a letter to his mother, Schumann declared that he had brought Jean-Paul’s novel to life in sounds. Much of the music is reworked from earlier pieces composed in the salon tradition. Schubert’s influence manifests itself in the preponderance of waltz and polonaise rhythms and the music’s lighthearted, pleasing quality. In Jean-Paul’s writings, butterflies usually symbolize the soul, capable of transfiguration and transformation. This concept resonated with Schumann, who transferred it to musical metamorphosis. He also took advantage of the more literal metaphor – Papillons celebrates its departure from a traditional plan, as unpredictable as a butterfly’s flight. Sudden shifts in mood are common, ranging from carefree and humorous to profound, emotional depth. Schumann frequently changes key and varies movement lengths. This unpredictability lends an aphoristic quality to each segment and underscores a sense of impetuosity.

This waltz begins with a trill on the dominant (E-flat) before breaking into a delightful melody. To distinguished Chopin interpreter, Moritz Rosenthal, the music evoked a brilliant Parisian Ball, full of elegance and coquetry. The second theme, in the bass register, suggests an aristocratic couple focused on each other, ignoring the passionate other dancers. After multiple repetitions of the initial theme and interludes the dance comes to a triumphant close.

Gargoyles is a four-movement suite written in 1989. The score exemplifies Liebermann’s accessible yet technically rigorous, intellectually challenging style, in which traditional harmonies and expressive gestures coexist with avant-garde procedures. Cathedral gargoyles often portray grotesque faces with great humor. The opening movement begins with a three-note “signal” and careens forward with obsessive perpetual motion rhythms, studded with shock-effects. The Adagio semplice is deeply introverted, presenting melancholy melodizing over patterns based on two alternating chords. Later, a still slower melody unfolds against repetitions of a single note. Crystalline sonorities mark the third Gargoyle, which floats a songful theme over luminous liquid swirls. Mordancy and menace return in the finale, which is dominated by demonic galloping rhythms, as textures grow steadily denser and virtuoso gestures more flamboyant.

Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor is one of the 19th century’s great masterpieces. Alan Walker, noted Liszt biographer, believes that “if Liszt had written nothing else, he would have to be ranked as a master on the strength of this work alone.” Liszt dedicated it to Schumann, who never heard it. Clara Schumann did hear it, but failed to appreciate it: “merely a blind noise – no healthy ideas anymore, everything confused, one cannot find a single, clear harmonic progression – and yet I must thank him for it [i.e., the dedication to Robert]. It really is too awful.” Wagner, on the other hand, rejoiced, finding the work “deep and noble.” The single movement Sonata unfolds in approximately 30 minutes of unbroken music and is built almost entirely from four continually altered and developed motifs.