• Home
• 2005 Season
• Order Tickets
• Support the Festival
• About Us
• Press Info

• Concerts
• Highlights
• Calendar
• Artists
• Music Director
• Composers
• Featured Performers
• Orchestra
• Special Events
• Education

Emily Wong

Award-winning pianist/composer Emily Wong began her professional career as the principal pianist and the youngest member of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music Orchestra. 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 Wong's playing as passionate, enthralling, brilliant, refined, with comments ranging from "clean and rhythmically charged" to "played beautifully" from The New York Times. Phil Collins of the Santa Cruz Sentinel wrote "She swept through the work with a magic wand … the dazzle was in itself splendid." As a pianist, she has appeared often with such orchestras as the San Francisco Symphony, the Oakland Symphony, Philharmonia Virtuosi, Continuum, American Composers Orchestra, and the Stamford Symphony. She has performed at the Sarasota, Idriart and Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, on the New York Philharmonic Chamber Series, 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. An active chamber musician, she has appeared in concert with such artists as Dennis Russell Davies, Nadia Solerno-Sonnenberg, Mark O'Connor, Ani Kavafien, Philip Glass, and members of the Tokyo String Quartet. She is currently Executive Director of the MusicArts Ensemble, producing collaborative multi-media events, and is a member of the critically recognized Locrian Chamber Players, the New York-based ensemble dedicated to presenting works of the past decade.

Wong 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. Later she completed her MM and DMA at the Juilliard School where she worked with Herbert Stessin and John Browning.

As a composer, Wong has  written a large body of works for piano, chamber ensemble, and orchestra. Her Apres le Tango (1998) for flute and piano was inspired by the lingering sounds of music heard that year as she learned to dance the tango, and was described in The New York Times as "a graceful work for flute and piano, in which tango rhythms seem to be recalled as if through a nostalgic haze." Later this became the middle movement of a suite entitled Triade. Her interest in the saxophone as a concert instrument led to her writing Quartet for Trio for saxophone, flute/alto flute and piano, which premiered in New York in 1999. Her music has been performed at the Moab Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, at Eckankar seminars around the U.S., and by such groups as the Locrian Chamber Players, MusicArts Ensemble and the Ragdale Ensemble.

Wong's music engenders genuine and enthusiastic responses from audiences of all ages. Performances are inevitably followed by requests for scores and recordings. Her performance of Circle Dance for solo piano in recital at UCSC in 1998 triggered a request from conductor Marin Alsop for an orchestral piece. Waves and Raves was a result of that inquiry, dedicated to Alsop, and was premiered by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music Orchestra in August 2000, with the help of a Meet the Composers Grant. Consequently, she received a commission for a full-length symphonic work from the Concordia Orchestra, which resulted in Symphony No. 1/Structures III, receiving its West Coast premiere in 2003 at the Cabrillo Festival.  Other performances followed with The Colorado Symphony Orchestra and the Chappaqua Orchestra. More recently she has been dedicated to fulfilling a growing list of commissions for chamber works with such pieces as Heard in the Echoes, for oboe, violin, violoncello, contrabass and piano, Trio for Clarinet,Viola and Piano, Romance No. 2 for solo violin, and Arise for oboe, clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano and dancer. She has also  released a CD of works including her Piano Quartet Tribute, written for the Concert Artists of Chappaqua, Triade for flute and piano, and Circle Dance.