Celebrating Pianos! Busoni & His Muses

Elizabeth Chang

Elizabeth Chang enjoys a varied career as performer, teacher, and arts administrator. In addition to her position as Professor of Violin at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she serves on the faculty of the Pre-College Division of the Juilliard School. Ms. Chang has embraced leadership roles in the arts community, currently serving as Artistic Director of Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, founder and director/co-director of Lighthouse Chamber Players, Five College New Music Festival, and UMass Amherst Bach Festival and Symposium. She has an active chamber music career, collaborating with some of the most prominent artists in the field, and has appeared as soloist, chamber musician and master class teacher in South America, Europe, and Asia. In 2024, Ms. Chang went on recital tours of Brazil, China, and Southeast Asia with pianist Jiayan Sun and released the CD Sonatas and Myths: Works by Szymanowski, Dohnanyi, and Bartók with Bridge Records in collaboration with pianist Steven Beck.

Erinn E. Knyt

Erinn E. Knyt is Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. in music with highest honors (U.C. Davis), an M.M. in music (Stanford University), and a Ph.D. in music and humanities (Stanford University).

Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, performance practice issues, and Bach reception, and has written extensively about Ferruccio Busoni. Her first book, Ferruccio Busoni and his Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2017), which explores Busoni’s relationship with early and mid-career composition mentees, was awarded an AMS 75 Pays Endowment Book Subvention. Knyt’s second book, Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound (Oxford University Press, 2023) and her third book, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” Reimagined (Oxford University Press, 2024), both received American Musicological Society subventions. Knyt was honored with the 2018 American Musicological Society Teaching Award.

Albert Cano Smit

Albert Cano Smit has “established himself as an artist to watch,” (Montreal Gazette), having won first prizes at the 2019 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the 2017 Walter W. Naumburg Piano Competition. Notable engagements include appearances with the San Diego, Seattle, Barcelona, Albany, and Montreal Symphonies, and Las Vegas and Rochester Philharmonics. He has given recital and chamber performances across the United States at the Kennedy Center, Merkin Concert Hall, Steinway Society–The Bay Area, Bravo! Vail Festival; in France at the Wissembourg Festival and Fondation Louis Vuitton; at Germany’s Rheingau Music Festival; in Xiamen, China; and throughout Spain.

Born in Geneva, the son of a Dutch mother and Spanish father who settled in Catalonia, he left home at nine to join the Escolania de Montserrat choir school. His piano studies took him to Juilliard, where he finished his artist diploma under the tutelage of Robert McDonald. He was awarded Juilliard’s Arthur Rubinstein Piano Prize in 2020, and is currently Iva Dee Hiatt Visiting Artist in Piano and Lecturer in Music at Smith College.

Yang Liu

Pianist Yang Liu attracts worldwide audiences with her profound musicianship and extraordinary virtuosity. “Her performance was incredibly expressive… effortlessly moving from delicate flourishes to pounding intensity…” (Toronto Star). She has performed extensively throughout the US, Europe, and China at numerous prominent venues, and has won many prestigious competitions, including the first prize at the Toronto International Piano Competition, among others. In 2022, Naxos Records released her album “Schubert: German Dances, Ländlers, and Écossaises,” and QQ Music in China released her album “Dancing on the Keys, Volume I.”

A graduate of The Juilliard School, Yale School of Music, and Peabody Institute–Johns Hopkins University, Yang Liu is also a devoted educator. She is on the piano faculty at Smith College while teaching actively in the New York region. Her students have won international competitions and been accepted into top conservatories. Yang Liu is a Steinway Artist.

Katherine Saik DeLugan

Katherine Saik DeLugan, mezzo-soprano, is a cross-genre vocalist and teacher who currently serves as a Core Lecturer in Music at Smith College. She holds a Bachelor of Music from UMass Amherst, and a Master of Music from the Manhattan School of Music where she focused on classical music and opera performance. As a graduate student, she was the second-place winner in the Alan and Joan Taub Ades Vocal Competition and first-place winner in the Eisenberg-Fried Concerto Competition.

Since returning to the Pioneer Valley, Katherine has been active in local and regional performing arts. She has appeared as a concert soloist with many regional orchestras, choirs and colleges. She has also appeared in several operas including La bohème (Mimi), Pagliacci (Nedda), Idomeneo (Idamante), Le Nozze di Figaro (Countess), and Die Walküre (Siegrune). Katherine was one of the artists who premiered a new song cycle “Unsaid Prayers” composed by Nico Gutierrez at Clark University.

Jiayan Sun

Praised by the New York Times for his “revelatory” performances, pianist Jiayan Sun has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra, the Chinese and RTÉ (Ireland) National Symphony Orchestras, the Fort Worth and Toledo Symphony Orchestras, the Toronto and Aspen Concert Orchestras, and he has conducted the Meiningen Court Orchestra from the keyboard. As a Steinway Artist and a prize winner in the Leeds, Cleveland, Dublin, and Toronto International Piano Competitions, his performances have been broadcast by the BBC, the RTÉ, China Central Television, and classical music radio stations in North America.

Born in Yantai, China, Mr. Sun received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Yoheved Kaplinsky and Sir Stephen Hough. Currently Assistant Professor of Music and the Associate Chair for Performance Activities at Smith College, he has performed Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas, in addition to presenting recital series devoted to the works by Schubert and Chopin.