"Katherine Chi... valiantly stepped in and appeared unfazed by the situation's added pressures... she is blessed with no shortage of talent and adroitly handled the concerto's considerable technical demands." [Prokofiev Piano Concerto #3, with the Colorado Symphony]
Denver Post

"Ms. Chi displayed a keen musical intelligence and a powerful arsenal of technique."
The New York Times

“...not just the most sensational, but, better, the most unfailingly cogent and compelling Prokofiev Third I have head in years.”
The Toronto Globe

"...her playing is all warmth, power, command and fantasy..."
The Boston Globe

"The Comeback Kid"
Toronto Globe & Mail

"Difficult Russian concerto handled with aplomb"
Ottawa Citizen

"Pianist Calls Attention to Vivid Contrasts in Style"
New York Times

"Chi plays with control and warmth" Boston Globe
 

Pianist Katherine Chi has performed throughout Europe and North America to great acclaim, including her 2003 New York recital debut, about which The New York Times wrote, “Ms Chi displayed a keen musical intelligence and a powerful arsenal of technique.” She has established herself as one of Canada’s fastest rising stars of classical music. “…the most sensational but, better, the most unfailingly cogent and compelling Prokofiev's Third I have heard in years,” said The Globe and Mail.

Ms. Chi’s upcoming performances in 2008/9 include her recital debut at Lincoln Centre. She will appear with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Victoria Symphony Orchestra, and National Arts Center Orchestra, where she will also be in residence. Other concerts include stops in Beijing, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Boston, Dresden, Leipzig, Montreal, and Ottawa. In addition, Ms. Chi is the artistic director and pianist in a series of concerts featuring Stockhausen’s Mantra, and she will tour the Western US and Canada with the Debussy Quartet.

Ms. Chi has also given memorable recitals in Hamburg, Hanover, Milan, Rome and Salzburg. She has appeared with the CBC Radio Orchestra in Vancouver, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, Toronto Sinfonia, and the Alabama, Calgary, Colorado, Edmonton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Philadelphia, Quebec, Thunder Bay, Victoria Symphony Orchestras and at festivals including Aldeburgh, Banff, Canada’s Festival of the Sound, Launadière, Domaine Forget, Marlboro, Osnabrück Kammermusik, Germany's Ruhr, Santander Summer Music, and Festival Vancouver.

Ms. Chi gave her debut recital at the age of nine. A year later she was accepted to The Curtis Institute of Music. She continued studies with Russell Sherman and Wha Kyung Byun at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she received her Master's degree and Graduate and Artist Diplomas. She later studied for two years at the International Piano Foundation in Como, Italy, and at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne. Other teachers include Seymour Lipkin, Galina Eguirazarova, and Wassily Lobanov. Ms. Chi was a prizewinner at the 1998 Busoni International Piano Competition and was the first Canadian and first woman to win Canada’s Honens International Piano Competition. Her debut recording, of works by Beethoven and Rachmaninov, was released in 2003 on Canada’s Arktos label. At the present time she is a resident in Boston where she teaches and pursues her Doctorate at the New England Conservatory of Music.



"After the Smetana, we had a memorable performance of Sergei Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto, with the young Calgary-born pianist Katherine Chi as soloist.

My resistance to all the Prokofiev concertos is considerable, possibly chemical, but it melted away in the face of this riveting account of the Third. Chi's playing was at once so lambently musical, so fiercely, analytically intelligent, and so intuitively kinetic in its rhythmic sweep (attributes too often mutually exclusive among interpretations of this music) that on this occasion Prokofiev leaped to life instead of falling numbly beneath the far more customary stretches of ennui punctuated by violent episodes of hammer and tongs.

Chi made sense and beauty of the lyricism, point and strength of the big sonorities, and musical continuity of the whole. Some of the subtleties of her shaping of the first movement were overborne by the orchestra, but as the performance proceeded a finer accord was reached, and from beginning to end conductor Miller presided over a secure rhythmic co-ordination between soloist and orchestra.

The upshot was not just the most sensational but, better, the most unfailingly cogent and compelling Prokofiev's Third I have heard in years."
Toronto Globe & Mail