lilac.

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purchase options, and commissioner biography

PROGRAM NOTE.

Lilacs are my favorite flower, this probably arising from a childhood spent running around in the back yard of my home that was graced by two gigantic lilac bushes whose blooms appeared for two weeks every May. It made sense to have lovely things in twos: after all, the back yard was a secret garden playspace only inhabited by two little Boyd girls as their childhood together ran its span. My little sister and I would take cuttings of the fragrant purple fronds and make small bouquets for our bedroom dresser but try as we might, our bouquets would always wilt and die within mere hours. Nonetheless, we kept making those tiny bouquets, year after year. In the next chapter of my life, I made prom corsages out of cuttings from those same bushes. In college, I would time my trips home from Chicago for the end of May so that I could be present for their period of blooming. Now that I live in Manhattan, I visit the bodega on the corner about once a week in May and June and spend too much money on bouquets of lilacs that hang on for a few days, pumping my apartment full of purple perfume and the memories that are now intrinsically bonded with it. I'm so pleased that Jenny Lin asked for small etudes from us ICEBERG composers; a work that was to be an amuse bouche but still have depth and character. I'm grateful to her for championing these works and for summoning in particular these memories of mine and this music out of the ether and on to ink and paper.

In 2020, Lilac was joined by 11 other preludes—a collection entitled Flower Catalog—commissioned by Lise de la Salle, Marianne Parker, Eunbi Kim, Holly Roadfeldt, Diane Katzenberg Braun, Lucille Chung, Marta Aznavoorian, Sarah Bob, Susie Maddocks, and Adrienne Park.

VIDEO.

COMMISSIONER biography.

Pianist Jenny Lin is an artist of keen musicianship, brilliant technique, and a compelling perspective shaped by a deep fluency in global culture. Born in Taiwan, raised in Austria, educated in Europe and America, Lin has built a vibrant international career, notable for innovative collaborations with a range of artists and creators.  In every performance, Jenny Lin places her considerable technical skills and her fierce intellect at the service of the composer’s intention, yielding results that win the loyalty and rapt attention of audiences and fellow artists alike.

In this most unusual season, Lin has performances – both digital, and in person – at the Mostly Mozart Festival, Washington Performing Arts, Winnipeg New Music, the Morris Museum, St. Olaf College, OKM Music in Oklahoma, and Silo Hill. She is the featured pianist in Elliot Goldenthal’s original motion picture score for Julie Taymor’s 2020 film, The Glorias.

Jenny Lin also continues her close collaboration with Philip Glass, performing his Etudes in concerts around the globe (she has appeared regularly with him since 2014).  This experience has inspired the creation of her own commissioning initiative, The Etudes Project, in which she works with a range of living composers to create new technical piano etudes, pairing each new piece with an existing etude from the classical canon. The results form both a series of solo recital programs and albums released by Sono Luminus. The first volume showcases Lin’s commissioning by ICEBERG New Music, a composer collective including a range of brilliant emerging composers. The Etudes Project; Vol. 1 ICEBERG was released to critical acclaim in 2019, and Volume 2 will be released in 2021.

Another recent project includes a new album (created in the summer of 2020 in “contactless” fashion) with accordionist Guy Klucevsek featuring the music of Georgian composer Giya Kancheli.  Other notable recordings in Lin’s catalogue (which includes more than 30 albums, on Hänssler Classic, eOne, BIS, New World, Albany, et al) include Philip Glass’s Etudes, the music of Arthur Schnabel, the complete Chopin Nocturnes, Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues Op. 87, the Liszt Sonata and Schumann Fantasie. Lin has also recorded “Get Happy,” an album of Broadway song arrangements, and her ingenious Steinway & Sons release of transcriptions of the songs of Chinese pop singer Teresa Teng.

Jenny Lin is the central figure in “Cooking for Jenny” by Felix Cabez for Elemental Films, a musical documentary portraying her journey to Spain. Other media appearances include CBS Sunday Morning, NPR Performance Today, and “Speaking for Myself”, a documentary by filmmaker Bert Shapiro, about Manhattan as seen through the eyes of eight contemporary artists.

A passionate advocate for education, Jenny created “Melody’s Mostly Musical Day“, a musical album and picture book for children, following the adventures of an imaginative little girl from breakfast to bedtime, told in a collection of 26 classical piano works from Mozart to Gershwin. Since the publication of the book in 2016, Lin has toured a  multimedia concert version of the program which she performs regularly at schools and educational institutions throughout North America.

Lin has performed with orchestras throughout the world, including the American Symphony Orchestra, NDR and SWR German Radio Orchestras, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, and others, with conductors including Lothar Zagrosek, Jiri Starek, Urs Schneider, Alexander Mickelthwate, Kek-Tjiang Lim, Wen-Pin Chien, Peter Bay, James Bagwell, and Celso Antunes. She has been presented in performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, at BAM Next Wave, Spoleto USA, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, and elsewhere.

Fluent in English, German, Mandarin, and French, Jenny Lin studied Noel Flores at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, with Julian Martin at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and with Dominique Weber in Geneva. She has also worked with Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, and Blanca Uribe, and at Italy’s Fondazione Internazionale per il pianoforte with Dimitri Bashkirov and Andreas Staier. In addition to her musical studies, Lin holds a bachelor’s degree in German Literature from The Johns Hopkins University. Jenny Lin currently resides with her family in New York City.

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