Hie-Yon Choi - Piano
Seoul National University College of Music
Hie-Yon Choi is widely recognized as one of the most sought-after pianists in Korea, and is a rising presence at many of the world’s music festivals and concert houses. Her emotionally profound and powerful performances have garnered prolonged ovation for “interpretation of the highest order” and “supreme pianistic mastery.“
Since her first public appearance at the age of six with the Incheon Symphony, Ms. Choi’s solo and concerto performances have been featured at all the major halls and orchestras in Korea, in addition to appearances with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and other important venues throughout the U.S. (Michigan, Indiana, Colorado, California, Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Hawaii, and Europe, including France, Italy, Austria, Germany and Greece as well as at halls in China and Sweden. Choi’s presentation of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonata cycle at a sold-out Kumho Art Hall in Seoul from 2002–2005 was considered a tour-de-force. She is also a devoted chamber musician, who in recent years has performed the complete piano trios, violin sonatas (with Mi-Kyung Lee) and cello works (with Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi) of Beethoven plus several projects exploring the chamber music of Brahms. She has been a regular guest at the Seoul Spring Chamber Music Festival since 2010.
Choi has recorded the complete Chopin etudes for Aulos, as well as music of Liszt and Isang Yun on the Parke & Davis and Neue Musik Institut Hdk Berlin labels, respectively. An advocate and stunning performer of new music, Ms. Choi was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Tong-Yeong International Music Festival in 2009 where she premiered works of Gyorgy Kurtag and Olivier Messiaen with the Seoul Philharmonic. In honor of the opening of the new IBK Hall in the Seoul Arts Center in 2011, Ms. Choi was invited to give a solo recital where she presented the complete etudes by Claude Debussy and Unsuk Chin. For her excellence as an artist of the highest caliber, she was awarded the Nanpa Music Prize in 2002 and the Arts Award in 2005, both in Korea.
Last year Choi gave the Korea premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Introitus” with Korea Chamber, a solo recital in hommage to York Hoeller, and performed the Sukhi Kang Concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic.
Most recently, Ms. Choi founded Ensemble2021, the ensemble-in-residence for Studio2021, a new music series at Seoul National University. She will serve as a jury member at the Orleans International Piano Competition next February.
In addition to her performance career, Ms. Choi serves as professor of piano at the Seoul National University College of Music.
Ms. Choi studied under Klaus Hellwig and Hans Leygraf at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she received her doctorate in the Performing Arts. She earned the Artist Diploma at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she studied under György Sebők.