Wong's music engenders
genuine and enthusiastic responses from audiences of all ages. Performances
are inevitably followed by requests for scoring and recordings. Her
Festival at the UCSC Recital Hall in 1998 triggered a request from conductor
Marin Alsop for an orchestral piece. Waves and Raves is a result to
that inquiry, and is dedicated to Ms. Alsop.
She is currently completing a CD recording of original works for small
ensemble, produced by jazz guitarist Rodney Joes. Other
projects-in-progress include a concerto for saxophone and orchestra, and a
suite for flute and piano to be performed by the Locrian Chamber Players in
New York City in August.
Wong began her professional career as the principal pianist and the youngest
member of the esteemed Cabrillo Music Festival Orchestra, known for their
innovative programming. With a growing interest in discovering and helping
to develop new "classics," she has gone on to champion the works of
many living composers including her own, and has been highly praised for
her interpretations of contemporary as well as traditional piano literature.
Critics have portrayed her playing as passionate, enthralling, brilliant,
refined and "clean and rhythmically charged" (The New York
Times). The Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote, "She swept through
the work with a magic want...the dazzle was in itself splendid."
As a pianist, she has appeared often with such orchestras as the San
Francisco Symphony, the Oakland Symphony, Philarmonica Virtuosi, Continuum,
American Composers Orchestra, and the Stamford Symphony. She has performed
at the Sarasota, Idriart and Cabrillo Music Festival, and in the Summer
Garden Series at the New York Museum of Modern Art in solo recitals of
the works of Igor Stravinsky and Eric Satie. She has recorded for New World
Records, Music Masters, Musical Heritage, and the BBC.
Recognized as a chamber musician, Wong has also collaborated with various
artists, including Dennis Russell Davies, Leslie Guinn, Ani Kavafien and
Camilla Wicks, and on the New York Philharmonic Chamber Series. She is a
member of the critically recognized Locrian Chamber Players, the New
York-based ensemble dedicated to presenting works of the past decade.
Already playing the piano by ear at the age of three, Wong began early
musical training at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As a youth she
won First Prize in the Pepsi-Cola Young Musicians Awards, and a Monterey
Peninsula Chamber Music Society Award. She received her Bachelor of Fine
Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, where she attended classes
with Harold Budd and Leonard Stein, and studied African music and dance with
the Ladzepko family, and piano with Leonid Hambro. She went on to win two
First Prizes at the Joanna Hodges International Piano Conference and
Competition, subsequently moving to New York City to pursue musical studies
on scholarship at the Juilliard School where she worked with Herbert Stessin
and John Browning, receiving her MM and DMA.
