Gloria Cheng

Grammy and Emmy Award-winning pianist GLORIA CHENG has long been devoted to creative collaborations with today’s composers. She has appeared as a soloist with the L.A. Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, and on its acclaimed Green Umbrella series with Esa-Pekka Salonen and Oliver Knussen. Ms. Cheng has been a recitalist at the Ojai Music Festival (where she first appeared in 1984 with Pierre Boulez), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, and Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. Ms. Cheng inspired and premiered such notable compositions as Esa-Pekka Salonen's Dichotomie (of which she is the dedicatee), John Adams' Hallelujah Junction, Steven Stucky's Piano Sonata, and John Williams’s Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra which she premiered in June, 2021, with Barcelona's Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès. Partnering with composers in duo-recitals, she premiered Thomas Adès's 2-piano arrangement of Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face and Terry Riley's Cheng Tiger Growl Roar. Ms. Cheng received a 2008 Grammy Award and a second Grammy nomination in 2013. Ms. Cheng's film, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano  aired on PBS SoCal and captured a 2018 Emmy Award.  Ms. Cheng is an Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where she creates courses and programs designed to unite performers, composers, and scholars.