Anthony Cheung
piano
Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses through a wide palette of instrumental color and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined artifacts, and layered textual meaning. His work often plays with ambiguous sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre.
Cheung has been commissioned by leading ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Cleveland Orchestra (as the 2015–17 Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), the LA Phil, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Yarn/Wire, Dal Niente, AMOC*, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. His piece Lyra was commissioned for the New York Philharmonic at the request of Henri Dutilleux, as part of the orchestra’s inaugural Kravis Prize for New Music. His music has also been performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (MusicNOW series), Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, the Minnesota Orchestra, Linea, Court-Circuit, wild Up, the Atlas Ensemble, and the Taipei Chinese Orchestra. He has written for the Parker, Escher, and Spektral Quartets; violinist Jennifer Koh; flutist Claire Chase; oboist Ernest Rombout; and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, David Kaplan, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan.
Cheung’s recordings include five portrait discs: All Roads (New Focus, 2022), Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022), Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien, 2014). His music and performances also appear on Warner Classics, New Focus, Tzadik, and Mode. He co-founded the Talea Ensemble, where he has served as pianist and artistic director.
The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, Cheung has also earned the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2012), awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP, and first prize in the Sixth International Dutilleux Competition (2008). He received a B.A. in music and history from Harvard, a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He previously taught at the University of Chicago and is currently Associate Professor of Music at Brown University.