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A
Pianist and Two Composers Come Together at Smith
 Performer and composers
will converge at Smith on Friday, March 1, when Genevieve
Feiwen Lee, pianist and multiple keyboard instrumentalist,
presents a concert and an afternoon workshop, including works
by two composers visiting campus.
Kurt Rohde, a composer
and violist, will join Lee for her performance workshop for
music students. Smith composer-in-residence Ge Gan-ru will
participate in a pre-concert conversation, at 7 p.m. in Earle
Recital Hall, before Lee’s 8 p.m. performance in Sweeney
Auditorium, Sage Hall. Joining Ge in the pre-concert conversation
will be Sujane Wu, professor of East Asian languages and
literatures, and Sara Loh ’13.
In addition to works by Rohde
and Ge Gan-ru, Lee’s concert, which is free and open to the
public, will include pieces by Claude Debussy and Francois
Couperin.
A versatile performer of music
spanning five centuries, Lee, the Everett S. Olive Professor
of Music at Pomona College, has dazzled audiences on the
piano, harpsichord, toy piano, keyboard and electronic instruments.
In solo and ensemble work, she has performed throughout the
United States, and in China, Europe and South America. She
appears on a newly released recording of works by Kurt Rohde,
released by Innova Records, and her solo piano CD, Elements (Albany Records), features the premiere recording of works
by Tom Flaherty and Philippe Bodin.
Genevieve
Feiwen Lee has given
solo piano recitals at Merkin Concert Hall in New York and
the Salle Gaveau in Paris. Since her first engagement with
the York Symphony at the age of 12, she has performed with
the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra
in Brazil, the Vrazta State Philharmonic in Bulgaria, and
The Orchestra of Northern New York. Beyond the concert hall,
her performances in Changsha, China, were broadcast by Hunan
State Television, and her concert from the Spiegelzaal at
the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam was broadcast on live radio
(AVRO). A champion of new music, Lee has premiered and commissioned
numerous works, including a recent work by Kurt Rohde for
speaking pianist, released in fall 2012. In the Los Angeles
area, she has been a guest performer with XTET and Southwest
Chamber Music, two of the area’s leading chamber music groups,
and has appeared on the Jacaranda series in Santa Monica.
She is a founding member of the Mojave Trio, playing regularly
on the “Sundays Live” concerts at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art. She has also been a member of the Garth Newel
Piano Quartet and has appeared regularly in chamber music
festivals at the Garth Newel Music Center, Virginia, and
Incontri di Canna, Italy.
Lee received her degrees from
the Peabody Conservatory of Music, École Normale de Musique de
Paris, and the Yale School of Music, where she studied with
Boris Berman. Lee has taught at Yale, Bucknell Universities,
and The Crane School of Music at SUNY-Potsdam. She joined
the Pomona College faculty in 1994 and is the first recipient
of the Everett S. Olive Professorship, endowed by Yuk Mei
Shim.
 Kurt Rohde is
a composer and violist living in San Francisco. He has received
the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Berlin
Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, the Charles Ives Fellowship and the Hinrichsen
Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and
commission awards from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the
Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University,
the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the National
Endowment for the Arts, and the Hanson Institute for American
Music. He was a featured composer with Southwest Chamber
Music as part of their “Ascending Dragon” project,
was composer-in-residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival,
and was guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference.
In 2011, he was a recipient of a Meet the Composer/Commissioning
Music USA grant, and was selected as a Chancellor’s Fellow
at the University of California, Davis. Rohde is the recipient
of the 2012 Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize.
 Ge Gan-ru,
described in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
as “China’s first avant-garde composer,” is regarded as one
of the most original composers of his generation. His music
is known for its immediately identifiable individualism and
unique sound. Ge has composed music for concerts as well
as theater, dance and documentary and feature films. The
New York Philharmonic, BBC Orchestra, Royal Scottish National
Orchestra, Lyon National Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic, American
Composers Orchestra, Orchestra of Castilla y Leon, Brooklyn
Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra,
Shanghai Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center,
the Kronos Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, Miami Quartet and many
other ensembles have commissioned and performed his works.
Ge was chosen as one of the two “most inspiring” classical
music composers in today’s world by New York’s Listen magazine
in 2010.
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