Described as “an invaluable new-music advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen” [The New York Times], Grammy and Emmy Award-winning pianist GLORIA CHENG has long been devoted to creative collaboration with composers of our time.
As a recitalist, she has performed at the Ojai Music Festival (where she began her association with Pierre Boulez in 1984), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and annually on the Los Angeles-based Piano Spheres series. She has premiered countless works that include John Williams’ Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen's Dichotomie (of which she is the dedicatee), John Adams' Hallelujah Junction for two pianos (written for her and Grant Gershon), and Steven Stucky's Piano Sonata. Partnering with composers in duo-recitals, she premiered Thomas Adès's 2-piano Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face and Terry Riley's Cheng Tiger Growl Roar.
She has appeared as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Zubin Mehta, and at the personal invitation of Boulez, performing Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques with him on the orchestra’s historic final concerts in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Other concerto appearances have brought her to the Louisville and Shanghai Orchestras; Indianapolis, Albanay, Pasadena, Pacific Symphonies. In June, 2021, she performed the world* and European** premieres of John Williams’ Prelude* and Scherzo** for Piano and Orchestra in Barcelona’s Palau de la Musica with the Orquesta Sinfónica del Vallès under Marc Timón.

In her home base of Los Angeles, she has been a principal artist with the Piano Spheres series, Jacaranda Music, Monday Evening Concerts, and on the L.A. Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series in Elliott Carter's Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord conducted by Oliver Knussen, and John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano with Jeffrey Milarsky.
Winner of the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) GRAMMY for her 2008 recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she was nominated a second time in 2013 for The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film project, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano — documenting six composers: Bruce Broughton, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, and John Williams as she recorded the works they’d written for her — won numerous festival awards and aired on PBS SoCal, subsequently capturing the 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy Award for Independent Programming.
Garlands for Steven Stucky is her 2018 star-studded CD tribute to the late composer by 32 of his friends and former students. Proceeds support the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Steven Stucky Composer Fellowship Fund, which engages young composers in multi-year educational programs with the orchestra.
A native of New Jersey, her formative studies were under the tutelage of Isabelle Sant'Ambrogio. Prior to embarking on her musical career, she earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Stanford University. Her decision to pursue the piano led to a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris and degrees in performance from UCLA and University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry.

She is currently on the faculty of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where she has created classes and programs that unite performers, composers, and scholars. She is often invited to speak as an advocate for contemporary music and in 2012 served as Regents Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

At an early age Jed Distler already knew that he wanted to do four things professionally: play the piano, compose music, host a radio show, and write record reviews. It took him a while, but Jed eventually achieved his youthful ambitions. Although Jed contributed occasional reviews for small New York arts publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it wasn’t until 1992 that the 35-year-old composer and pianist got an opportunity to cover classical CDs on a regular basis. He began with a CD column for Piano Today magazine, followed by a stint at Tower Records’ in-store magazine Pulse!, and a contributing editorship at Piano & Keyboard. Jed also edited Tower’s 2001 Classical Music Guide.

Feature articles, interviews, profiles and editorial pieces soon followed, together with the first of more than 100 major and independent label booklet annotations for new releases and reissues featuring artists such as Leonard Bernstein, Martha Argerich, Claudio Arrau, Andor Foldes, Maurizio Pollini, Van Cliburn, Leon Fleisher, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Marc-André Hamelin, Vladimir Horowitz, Wilhelm Backhaus, Alfred Cortot, Joseph Szigeti, Walter Gieseking, Leopold Stokowski, Artur Schnabel, Paul Badura-Skoda and Ralph Kirkpatrick. Jed also wrote extensively for International Piano Quarterly, International Classical Record Collector, and BBC Magazine. He also wrote numerous editorial classical and jazz reviews for Amazon.com upon the launch of its music store.

In 1997 Jed was invited to join the reviewing staff of Gramophone, the world’s oldest and most venerated English language classical recording magazine, for whom he continues to contribute regular reviews and articles. Two years later Jed became a founding staff writer for Classicstoday.com, the internet’s first professional record reviewing site.

Jed garnered much attention and noteriety in 2007 for helping to uncover the scandal exposing hundreds of recordings fraudulently recited to pianist Joyce Hatto, and was featured in a television documentary on the subject.

Although Jed’s reviews cover a wide range of composers and genres, he’s best known for his coverage of piano music and pianists. Jed aims to describe performances in ways that both professionals and laymen can understand, to compare them with other recordings when relevant, and, finally, to make a recommendation, abetted by his deep working knowledge of the keyboard repertoire and its recorded history from acoustic cylinders to digital downloads. At the same time, Jed remains open to new artists, new interpretations and new technologies confounding his expectations.

Wojciech Kocyan was praised for his “highly distinctive performances (…) superb, intelligent artistry (…)” (.Classics Today.com) and “incisive temperament, impeccable technique and sumptuous tone” (Le Monde de la Musique.)

"Genius" Gramophome magazine

Dr. Kocyan is a Clinical Professor of Piano at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

He studied with two of the world’s most esteemed piano pedagogues: Andrzej Jasinski in Poland, where he received his Masters Degree and with John Perry at the University of Southern California, where he received a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree.

He is a laureate of several international piano competitions, including F.Busoni, Wideman and Viotti, as well as a special prizes winner of the XI International Chopin Competition and a First Prize winner of the Paderewski Piano Competition in Poland. He performed in Europe, America, Mexico, Australia and Japan, participating in music festivals such as Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis, Capri Festival, Bydgoszcz International Music Festival, H.M.Gorecki Festival, Beethovenfest, Paderewski Festival, Liszt Festival in Vienna, San Francisco Liszt Festival, Cervantino International Music Festival, Morelia International Music Festival and the Chopin Festival in Paris.He has recorded for television, radio and film and his performances were broadcast in Europe, United States and Australia. His solo and chamber music recordings can also be found on DUX, Naxos and Spotify
In 2007 the Gramophone magazine, published in London and considered the world’s most prestigious classical music journal, chose Mr. Kocyan’s recording of Prokofiev, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff as one of 50 best classical recordings ever made, alongside recordings of such luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau, Nicolaus Harnoncourt and Arthur Rubinstein.

Dr. Kocyan is also active as an adjudicator, lecturer, scholar and arts administrator. Besides numerous California competitions of all levels, including many state-wide competitions, he repeatedly judged the MTNA Performance Competition at the State and Division levels, the American International Paderewski Piano Competition, Czerny-Stefanska International Piano Competition, Guitar Foundation of America International Artist Competition, International Peninsula Festival in Los Angeles and Schimmel- Arizona Youth Piano Competition. He has given masterclasses and lectures in France, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Serbia, Mexico and United States, including such prestigious venues as the Colburn School in Los Angeles, the Chopin University in Warsaw and the Szymanowski Academy in Katowice, Poland. He twice presented lectures and masterclasses at the World Piano Pedagogy Conference. In 2015 and 2019 he presented lectures and masterclasses at the World Piano Conference in Serbia and was appointed the judge of the annual World Piano Competition.

In October 2017 he was one of five eminent international speakers invited to present a lecture at the international musicological conference “ Competition or music put to the test”, organized by the Chopin Institute in Warsaw in conjunction with the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. His paper on the evolution of the performance style in the history of the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw was included in the inaugural issue of the “Chopin Review”, a leading publication in Chopin scholarship, published by the National Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland. In 2018 he was a presenter at the Music Teachers Association National Conference in Orlando, Florida and was invited to present at the Music Teachers Association National Conference in 2022 as well.

Dr. Kocyan serves as the Artistic Director and President of the Paderewski Music Society in Los Angeles and the Director of the American International Paderewski Piano Competition in Los Angeles. He is also the past President of the California Association of Professional Music Teachers, Santa Monica/South Bay Chapter , current President of the West Los Angeles Branch of the Music Teachers Association of California, is a voting member of the Polish Academy of Recording Arts and serves on the boards of several other cultural organizations.

Wojciech Świtała is a graduate of the Academy of Music in Katowice, Poland in the class of Prof. Józef Stompel. In 1991–1996 he perfected his piano skills under the supervision of Karl-Heinz Kämmerling, André Dumortier and Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden.

He is a laureate of the International Piano Competitions in Paris (Marguerite Long and Jacques Thibaud Competition) and Montreal. He was the best Polish participant in the 12th International Piano Competition Fryderyk Chopin in Warsaw in 1990. It was then that he received the award for the best performance of a polonaise and a number of extra-statutory prizes.

He has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in most European countries, North and South America, Asia and Australia. He has performed with most Polish symphony orchestras, the Aukso Orchestra, Silesian Quartet, Camerata Quartet, Royal String Quartet, as well as violinists Szymon Krzeszowiec, Piotr Pławner and soprano Ewa Iżykowska.

He has recorded several albums for the following labels: Polskie Nagrania, Bearton, DUX, Sony Music Polska, IMC and Chandos with music by Bacewicz, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Schumann, Szymanowski and Zarębski.

In 2000 and 2005, his albums were awarded the Grand Prix du Disque Frédéric Chopin. In 2002, 2009 and 2019 he was honored with the "Fryderyk" award.

Since 1998, the pianist has also been working as a teacher. He is a professor in the Piano Department at the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice.

In the years 2008-12 he was additionally vice-rector for science and didactics, and in the years 2012-16 he was the head of the Piano Department at this University. Since 2020, he is also a professor at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.

Juror of international piano competitions: Marguerite Long and Jacques Thibaud in Paris (2009), Fryderyk Chopin in Warsaw (2015, 2021), Arthur Rubinstein in Beijing (2016), Vladimir Horowitz in Kiev (2016, 2019), Ignacy Jan Paderewski in Bydgoszcz (2010, 2013), as well as many others (Australia, Bulgaria, France, Japan, Singapore, Italy, USA). He regularly conducts piano courses in Poland and abroad (China, Japan, Germany, USA). Originator and the main organizer (until 2017) of the International Piano Courses in Katowice. In 2014, he was appointed to the Program Council of the National Fryderyk Chopin Institute. From December 2021, a member of the board of the Frederic Chopin Society in Warsaw.

Pianist and internationally acclaimed piano educator ADAM WIBROWSKI studied with professors Halina Czerny-Stefanska and her husband Ludwik Stefanski at Cracow Academy of Music where he received his Masters Degree in piano performance. Later, Dr. Wibrowski followed his studies at Doctorate 3 Cycle at Sorbonne, Paris. His piano awards include: 1st Prize at the National Chopin Competition in Poland, Diploma de Honor at Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona, Spain, and the First Prize at the Union Francaise des Artistes Musiciens, France. Mr. Wibrowski received also the MTNA Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and Music Studies (USA). He has taught successively at Grenoble Conservatory, France, University of Southern California, USA, European Virtuosity Class, Netherlands, Katowice Superior Academy of Music, Poland, and Paris Conservatory, France, the latter continuously since 2000.
Mr. Wibrowski has taught master classes at major Universities and Conservatories in the USA (UCLA, Yale, Rice), Canada (McGill, U.B.C., Concordia), Australia, Japan, Vietnam, Italy, and China. He is also the founder and Artistic Director of Chopin Festival at Nohant, France; European Music Sessions, Netherlands; Liszt Piano Festival, Hungary and Austria Piano Summer, Vienna-Wiener Neustadt, and recently of Polish Music Piano Competition in Hamburg, Germany. Dr. Wibrowski is the President of Chopin Association in Nohant, France; Member of the Paderewski Association, Switzerland; Member of the Board of Directors of the Paderewski Music Society in Los Angeles; and the Director of the Program of the European Union Culture Commission: "Piano-European Cultures"