Jenny Lin
Pianist Jenny Lin is an artist of keen musicianship, brilliant technique, and a compelling perspective shaped by a deep fluency in global culture. Born in Taiwan, raised in Austria, educated in Europe and America, Lin has built a vibrant international career, notable for innovative collaborations with a range of artists and creators. In every performance, Jenny Lin places her considerable technical skills and her fierce intellect at the service of the composer’s intention, yielding results that win the loyalty and rapt attention of audiences and fellow artists alike.
In the 21/22 season, Lin has performances – both digital, and in person – for Washington Performing Arts; at Hudson Hall performing the American premiere of William Bolcom’s Suite of Preludes; at Boston Conservatory’s piano series; at Little Island in NYC; and at Winnipeg New Music performing a piano concerto by Harry Styfalakis. She also releases a number of new albums, including Simple Music with music by Giya Kancheli in partnership with accordionist Guy Klucevsek; Liszt Harmonies poétiques et religieuses on the Steinway label with pianist Adam Tendler; and a new recording featuring the complete vocal works of Artur Schnabel with contralto Sara Couden, a complement to Lin’s earlier album of the complete Schnabel piano works.
Recent performances include dates for the Mostly Mozart Festival; at “Angel’s Share” in the catacombs of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery; at St. Olaf College; at OKM Music in Oklahoma; and as the featured pianist in Elliot Goldenthal’s original motion picture score for Julie Taymor’s 2020 film, The Glorias. She performed a recital of Philip Glass’s music for the Morris Museum – a continuation of a close collaboration with Glass, with whom she has appeared regularly since 2014. This experience has inspired the creation of her own commissioning initiative, The Etudes Project, in which she works with a range of living composers to create new technical piano etudes, pairing each new piece with an existing etude from the classical canon. The results form both a series of solo recital programs and albums released by Sono Luminus. The first volume showcases Lin’s commissioning by ICEBERG New Music, a composer collective including a range of brilliant emerging composers. The Etudes Project; Vol. 1 ICEBERG was released to critical acclaim in 2019, and Volume 2 is forthcoming.
Other notable recordings in Lin’s catalogue (which includes more than 30 albums, on Hänssler Classic, eOne, BIS, New World, Albany, et al) include Philip Glass’s Etudes, the complete Chopin Nocturnes, Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues Op. 87, the Liszt Sonata and Schumann Fantasie. Lin has also recorded “Get Happy,” an album of Broadway song arrangements, and her ingenious Steinway & Sons release of transcriptions of the songs of Chinese pop singer Teresa Teng.
Jenny Lin is the central figure in “Cooking for Jenny” by Felix Cabez for Elemental Films, a musical documentary portraying her journey to Spain. Other media appearances include CBS Sunday Morning, NPR Performance Today, and “Speaking for Myself”, a documentary by filmmaker Bert Shapiro, about Manhattan as seen through the eyes of eight contemporary artists.
A passionate advocate for education, Jenny created “Melody’s Mostly Musical Day“, a musical album and picture book for children, following the adventures of an imaginative little girl from breakfast to bedtime, told in a collection of 26 classical piano works from Mozart to Gershwin. Since the publication of the book in 2016, Lin has toured a multimedia concert version of the program which she performs regularly at schools and educational institutions throughout North America. This season also marks a decade of outreach concerts Lin has programmed and presented in retirements communities.
Lin has performed with orchestras throughout the world, including the American Symphony Orchestra, NDR and SWR German Radio Orchestras, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, and others, with conductors including Lothar Zagrosek, Jiri Starek, Urs Schneider, Alexander Mickelthwate, Kek-Tjiang Lim, Wen-Pin Chien, Peter Bay, James Bagwell, and Celso Antunes. She has been presented in performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, at BAM Next Wave, Spoleto USA, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, and elsewhere.
Fluent in English, German, Mandarin, and French, Jenny Lin studied Noel Flores at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, with Julian Martin at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and with Dominique Weber in Geneva. She has also worked with Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, and Blanca Uribe, and at Italy’s Fondazione Internazionale per il pianoforte with Dimitri Bashkirov and Andreas Staier. In addition to her musical studies, Lin holds a bachelor’s degree in German Literature from The Johns Hopkins University. Jenny Lin currently resides with her family in New York City and serves on the faculty of Mannes College The New School for Music.