Piedmont Piano Company is pleased to present
Monica Chew
Plays Prokofiev, Kodaly, and Ginastera
Monica Chew plays Prokofiev, Kodaly, and Ginastera in her 5th appearance at Piedmont Piano. The program starts off with a bang, with Alberto Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas, followed by Zoltan Kodaly's folk-inspired pieces from op. 11. The second half is Prokofiev's 8th sonata (his last war sonata), an epic journey at times majestic, melancholy, sarcastic, and profoundly human.
FREE ADMISSION
Space is limited. RSVP is a must.
Donations welcome
Monica Chew is an Oakland pianist. In 2017, she released her first solo album, Tender and Strange, featuring works by Bartók, Janáček, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Scriabin. A “gifted player with an affinity for deeply sensitive expression” (Whole Note, June/July/August 2018), her playing is “wonderfully delicate, like tissue” (International Pianist, July/August 2018). She started composing in 2017 and couldn’t be happier about it. She premiered her first songs for soprano and piano in 2018 and completed her first commission for Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s Intersection 2019 workshop. She loves playing chamber music and received a Zellerbach Family Foundation award for her work with Minsky Duo, which she co-founded in 2016. Prior to 2015, she neglected piano for nearly a decade to work as a principal software engineer on security and privacy at Mozilla and Google after receiving her Master of Music from SF Conservatory of Music and a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley. She lives in Oakland with her husband, an 1899 Steinway B, a clavichord, and a disused violin. monicachew.com