Chinese-born pianist Wei Luo, who graduates from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia this month, brought the Gilmore Piano Festival to a close in spectacular style on May 15 when she played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Kalamazoo Symphony. The 2018 Gilmore Young Artist will play the first movement of the same concerto at 7:30 pm on Saturday, April 21 with the Brass Band of Battle Creek at its Spring Concert.
Luo tells Cara Lieurance she's looking forward to hearing the Tchaikovsky concerto in a new way when she joins the group of top international brass players on Saturday. Her calendar is full of concerto performance in the U.S. and China, but one of her most personal projects is a multi-media collaboration based on her poetry about the music of Prokofiev. They talk about how much she came to identify with a work written during a time of turmoil for the composer.