Bravura Philharmonic’s “A Concerto Extravaganza,” on Sunday, May 13, features winners of the 2012 Young Artists competition. The young soloists were selected among a group of 40 contestants who came from throughout New Jersey to participate in the competition last February. Charlie Liu, 11, of West Windsor, performs Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2.
Liu has won more than 20 solo piano competitions, including first place in the New Jersey and Massachusetts Music Teacher Associations, the Steinway Society of Princeton Scholarship, the American Association for the Development of the Gifted and Talented International, and top prize in the American Fine Arts Festival and Cecilian Music Club competitions. He is also a winner of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation Scholarship in 2008.
He completed a Carnegie Hall “Grand Slam” at age 8 after performing in all three concert halls at the venue. He has performed in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra debut at Carnegie Hall, He has appeared on Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey shows, performed for Queen Rania of Jordan and Bono of U2. Liu has also performed at Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, and the Segerstrom Concert Hall. He has studied with Tatyana Berketova, and Irina Kirilenko. His teachers include Soo Kyung Cho of West Windsor, and Ingrid Clarfield, professor of piano at Westminster Choir College.
His father, Mingyi Liu, is a bioinformatician at Bristol Myers Squibb. His mother, Jen Xie, is a physician in SUNY Downstate anesthesia department. His brother, William, 6, is in first grade at Town Center School. He began playing the piano at age 5 and recently performed in Carnegie Hall after winning a competition.
Liu was born in Iowa and lived in Massachusetts before moving to West Windsor in July, 2007. He began studying piano when he was four, won his first piano competition when he was five, and performed his first solo recital at age six. He is a sixth grade student at Grover Middle School.
He has been a Princeton Youth Hockey Association travel hockey player for the last five years and he is a skiier. “He loves video games and has almost all current video game consoles except for the Sony ones,” says his father. He exceled in math, taking first place in the sixth grade Math League competition in Mercer County, and tying for eighth place in the whole state. He has also won second place in Greater Princeton Chess Competition.
Liu also excels at community service, he regularly helps out at benefit events for the community, and has performed solo concerts at Millstone River School and Robbins School in Trenton to inspire children to learn music. He and his friends held a benefit for Haiti two years ago and he had a solo benefit concert after the earthquake in Japan last year. (The News, March 19, 2010).
The concert will be conducted by its director, Chiu-Tze Lin. Other competition winners performing include violinist Hannah Lam, cellist Zachary Mowitz, and pianist Brielle Perez. The orchestra will also perform the “Academic Festival Overture” by Johannes Brahms.
Spring Concert, Bravura Philharmonic Orchestra, Princeton Alliance Church, 20 Schalks Crossing Road, Plainsboro. Sunday, May 13, 7 p.m. $12 to $25. 609-790-9559 or www.bravuraphil.org.
