BEETHOVEN SYMPHONY NO. 1

Pianist Joyce Yang came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the Twelfth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant at age 19, she won the awards for best performance of chamber music and a new work. A Steinway artist, she received an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2010. She has performed with the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, and the Chicago, Houston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, among others, working with conductors including James Conlon, Edo de Waart, Lorin Maazel, Peter Oundjian, David Robertson, Leonard Slatkin, Bramwell Tovey, and Jaap van Zweden. She has appeared in recital at Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and Zurich’s Tonhalle. As an avid chamber musician, Yang has collaborated with the Takács Quartet for Dvořák—part of Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series—and Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet with members of the Emerson String Quartet at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. Yang has also fostered an enduring partnership with the Alexander String Quartet. Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1986, she received her first piano lesson from her aunt at age four. In 1997 she moved to the U.S. to begin studies at The Juilliard School Pre-College Division. After winning The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with that orchestra at age 12. She appears in the film In the Heart of Music, a documentary about the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition.

JULIA PERRY (1924 - 1979)

SHORT PIECE (1952)

Scored for: pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, harp, piano, celesta, and strings Performance time: 8 minutes

First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Julia Perry was a prolific American composer as well as a conductor and pedagogue. Born in Lexington, Kentucky and raised in Akron, Ohio, she began her musical study at an early age. After completing her instrumental studies at Westminster Choir College (studying piano, voice and composition), she continued her education in composition at Juilliard and the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

Julia Perry received two Guggenheim fellowships in 1952 and 1954. With the support of these awards, Perry, like many other prominent Black artists of that time, left the United States for Europe where she studied first with Luigi Dallapicolla in Florence, then with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, joining the ranks of the most prominent students of the worldfamous pedagogue, including George Walker, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Quincy Jones.

It was during her years in Europe that Perry composed her Short Piece, a work that demonstrates her command of more abstract and neoclassical music. Her earlier pieces—mostly songs and spirituals—were more directly influenced by Black musical idioms.