Pianist Ko-Eun Yi joins University Symphony Orchestra for an all-Gershwin program

Ko-Eun Yi, a winner of the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, joins the University Symphony Orchestra for a program celebrating the unique genius of George Gershwin. The Korean-born pianist will perform Concerto in F with the 100-member orchestra on Saturday, April 22, at 8 p.m. at Mandel Hall

Ko-Eun Yi has earned high praise for playing with “élan and fire and a surplus of bravura technique” (Cincinnati Enquirer). She has garnered numerous top prizes in her young career, with recent successes at the 2010 World Piano Competition in Cincinnati and the 2010 Wideman International Piano Competition in Jackson, Mississippi. A compelling recitalist, she has given solo concerts around the US—at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in NYC, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, the Bossier ‘Jam’n Bread’ Chamber Series in Shreveport, LA, and at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts—as well as internationally in Spain and Korea.

“It’s a particular thrill to present Gershwin’s Concerto in F, which is often overshadowed by the enormous popularity of his Rhapsody in Blue”, says USO Music Director Barbara Schubert. “The Concerto is a far more ambitious piece—both in terms of its solo writing and from the standpoint of its compositional structure and orchestral textures. Like Gershwin’s other great works, it is infused with the rhythmic excitement and coloristic appeal of Jazz and Broadway, but it is also firmly rooted in the Classical tradition of Mozart and Beethoven. In all it represents the very best of Gershwin.”

A fresh arrangement of the composer’s Three Preludes will open the concert. Gershwin composed these short works for piano, each a hybrid example of the ragtime, blues, jazz, and classical music styles that he so deftly combined. By the time Gershwin wrote the Three Preludes in 1926, he was an international sensation, having premiered the Rhapsody in Blue two years prior.

The composer’s ever-popular An American in Paris rounds out the program. The tone poem was crafted “to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere” of the famed capital city. For this upcoming performance, the University of Chicago Symphony will utilize authentic 1929 taxi horns, recently brought to the attention of the music world by musicologists at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

The concert takes place on Saturday, April 22 at 8 p.m. on the University of Chicago campus at Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th Street. Admission is free, but donations are requested at the door at $10 general and $5 for students. For more information call 773-702-8069 or visit music.uchicago.edu.