British born pianist Tania Chen is rapidly becoming one of the outstanding young pianists of her generation, following in the path of the superlative contemporary pianist, David Tudor, whose repertoire of the experimental and avant-garde is her chief inspiration. She has pursued advanced studies with Stephen Coombs and Artur Pizarro in London, and more recently with the acclaimed contemporary pianist John Tilbury.
At sixteen she was accepted at the Guildhall School of Music and Royal College of Music as a first study pianist and completed her ARCM in performance at the Royal College of Music. She has continued her studies under John Tilbury, at Goldsmiths College and has been awarded prizes of distinction including the Shelley Scholarship in Performing Arts, as well as performing in masterclasses with leading music figures such as Mtslav Rostropovich. She is now an active pianist in the contemporary field, both as a performing artist and also academically, regarding performance and academic understanding as contributing to the dynamism and depth of her performances. In the area of Contemporary performance practice she will be giving papers at the International Contemporary Conference, at University of London, as well as the David Tudor Symposium, at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles.
Projects for 2001 include a recording of the piano music of Cornelius Cardew Sonatas 1, 2 & 3, and other rediscovered Cardew material in the David Tudor Archive, a recording projects of the piano music of Evangelisti, Bussotti and Earle Brown, for Mode Records, as well as recording the complete solo piano music of Andrew Poppy, and the piano music of Michael Parsons.
She has performed with the Park Lane Artists Group at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and will also be collaborating on a film documentary project exploring the relationship between music and architecture which will be shown on Channel 4. She currently is the pianist of Ensemble RRRRRR as well as the Andrew Poppy Ensemble. Recent concerts have included Dal Niente II featuring the graphic and mobile scores of Earle Brown, John Cage and Morton Feldman some of which were directed by Earle Brown himself. She recently performed the rarely heard Third Piano Sonata by the leading experimental British composer, Cornelius Cardew at New Music at the Cochrane Theatre, London, in which she also gave the British premiere of Evangelisti's virtuoso piano work, Proeizione Sonore. Other concerts have included the British Music Information Centre in which she has given performances of Laurence Crane, Michael Parsons, Cornelius Cardew, Graham Fitkin and Chris Newman, and concerts in Fukuoka, Japan, playing Webern and music written for piano and electronics. Later this year she will be playing a two piano recital with John Tilbury, of rare premieres of piano transcriptions by Schoenberg/Webern, Cage/Satie, Cardew/Dave Smith, Kagel/Machaut, and Chris Hobbs/Ives, in the Purcell Room. The last piano recital of this programme, as John Tilbury recalls, was the one he gave with his close friend Cornelius Cardew which occured over forty years ago.
Tania will also be performing solo piano works by Cardew and Christian Wolff at the Logos Foundation in Belgium later this year and in 2002 Tania will be playing the complete Music of Changes by John Cage both at the South Bank in London, and at the Biannual Contemporary Arts Documenta Festival, in Kasel, Germany.
Following in the musical creativity of Cornelius Cardew and AMM as well as the Italian School of improvisers, Nuova Consananza, Tania Chen is also an active improviser and plays regularly with leading improvisers like David Ryan, Alan Tomlinson and John Edwards, all of whom have achieved leading reputations as todays most imaginative and accomplished live and recorded artists in the UK and abroad.