Frederic Chiu is a perennial guest at the Newport Music Festival and has traveled across the USA on extended recital tours with Community Concerts.

"He has reinvented virtuosity...a phenomenon that must be heard." (Le Monde, Paris). His most recent discs include Distant Voices (Debussy and Gao Ping), Liszt’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Symphony V, Saint-Saën’s Carnival of the Animals (with storyteller David Gonzalez), and Hymns and Dervishes—music by Gurdjieff and de Hartmann.

Critics count his Asian/American/ European background as one of his strengths, permitting him a wider point of view in studying the music he plays. In North America he has appeared in the Place des Arts in Montreal, at the Ambassador Theatre in Pasadena, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Lincoln Center and the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York.

This led him to develop alternative methods of practice that involved score study, meditation and visualization. After 12 years spent in France, Frederic Chiu recently returned to the USA.

Frederic Chiu records for the French Harmonia Mundi label, with over 20 CDs on the market.

“All of them serve specific purposes, and each one has a role in how pianists share their music,” Chiu said.

Another part of his background gives him unusual insight into collaboration: his brother is a violinist, and as the pair was growing up Frederic often accompanied him. A nontraditional approach that emphasizes audience engagement, new technologies and interdisciplinary collaboration sets him apart from his peers.

As a performer, Chiu has now been a Yamaha Artist for more than 35 years, and he has stayed closely involved with the company’s research and piano artist office.

Chiu is as involved and dedicated to the history of classical music as he is reaching for the future and adopting new technologies. Mr. Chiu has toured Europe and the U.S.

with the Orchestre de Bretagne and Stefan Sanderling. The latter demonstrates the pianist’s ongoing adventurousness.

 

AWARDS

Frederic Chiu’s early career followed traditional avenues.

Frederic Chiu has toured extensively in the USA and Europe, appearing with the major orchestras and in solo recitals in the major venues.

He attended Indiana University, where he pursued a double major in piano performance and computer science.

“My father taught math, physics and computer science throughout my childhood, providing me with extensive exposure to these subjects from an early age.

He received more publicity as a result than did the winner; The New York Times began referring to him as a "maverick pianist." Since then, he has received more positive recognition as the recipient of the Petscheck Award of the Juilliard School, the American Pianists Association Fellowship, and the 1996 Avery Fisher Career Grant.

He has also an early and ongoing exploration of artificial intelligence and human psychology, especially the body-mind-heart connection. He has also recorded transcriptions of music by Rossini and, more conventionally, Ravel's piano music and Frédéric Chopin's Op. 10 etudes. I wanted to continue. “In just three days we were able to produce an audio product, a video shoot, and a DisklavierTV documentary,” he says with amazement.

 

WRITING

Frederic Chiu has written extensively about his recorded and performing repertoire in his Program Notes.

It forces you to be resourceful. “I saw a prototype made for Sviatoslav Richter, who needed a practice piano for traveling.

At that point Frederic Chiu decided to base his performing career in Paris.