Piano
Chen Pi-hsien
陈必先
Biography
Born in Taipei in 1950; on stage at five, and at nine the first musically gifted child Taiwan sent to Germany on a state scholarship. She studied in Cologne with Hans-Otto Schmidt-Neuhaus, and later with Kempff, Arrau, Anda and Nikolayeva. In 1972 she took first prize at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich and a prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, followed by first prizes at the International Schoenberg Competition in Rotterdam and the International Bach Competition in Washington. She became professor of piano at the Cologne Hochschule in 1983, the youngest in the school's history, and moved to the Freiburg Hochschule in 2004. Her repertoire centres on Bach and the Schoenberg line, and she has spent a career inside new music, working with Cage, Carter, Boulez, Stockhausen, Kurtág and Eötvös, and premiering Georg Friedrich Haas's Limited Approximation at Donaueschingen in 2010.