Like most classical pianists, Gloria Cheng started her career with mandatory Beethoven sonatas and Chopin études, but she now specializes in the esoteric world of contemporary music. The compositions—described as "the gnarliest music" around—require not only technical mastery, but also the openness to see beyond conventional musical language. She has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and at chamber music and solo concerts, playing well-known pieces and also those that call for plucking piano strings with a credit card, singing or, as for one John Cage composition, blowing a duck whistle in water. The Los Angeles Times has called her a "heroic, stunning pianist." Last spring she won the 2009 Grammy Award for the best solo instrumental performance (without orchestra).
Shortly after Cheng, '76, won her Grammy, she was back at UCLA, where she is a lecturer in performance. That day colleagues stopped by to congratulate her, but she was focused on the evening's performance by a student ensemble known as Contempo Flux. She had borrowed music from the school library, fitting in pieces by Steven Stucky and Sofia Gubaidulina that could accommodate piano, harpsichord, xylophone, flute, guitar and tuba. "You can never be too loud," she told the tuba player.
"Could you be more robotic?" she later asked a pianist. "Be as withholding as the music is."
This contemporary chamber music class is the first of its kind on campus. "Contemporary music appeals to me on so many levels," Cheng says. "I love being able to work with the person who made the music. I'm not just traipsing the same ground that hundreds have already. With contemporary music, I can help shape it and feel like I'm here to bring music into the world."
Cheng has been singled out by some of the world's best-known contemporary composers—including John Adams, Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who all have created pieces for her. She won her Grammy for the CD Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky and Lutoslawski (Telarc). When she took the stage to accept (in what she confides was a $14 vintage dress), she thanked her brother Kenneth, '73, for defending her decision to pursue music that a lot of people don't understand instead of an MBA.
Cheng took her first piano lesson at age 4, but no one expected her to become a concert pianist. That included her first teacher, her mother, who hoped she'd learn the instrument, then grow up and choose a practical career in business.
"My grandmother taught my mother in Shanghai and then my mother taught me," says Cheng, who grew up in suburban Teaneck, N.J. "I played, but I wasn't in love with it. There were other things I was interested in doing."
After graduating from Stanford (in deference to her father, she majored in economics), Cheng moved to Los Angeles, where she now lives with her husband, Leftéris Padavos, an advertising photographer. She earned an MFA in performance at UCLA, then spent a year in Paris studying piano and music theory, living on about a dollar a day.
"Apples and brie," she says. "In your 20s, you can live on that. Actually, I still kind of do that."
Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, she entered the MBA program at UCLA. She surprised herself by enjoying statistics and management training, but knew that, ultimately, "it wasn't for me." She left after one quarter and threw herself into practicing piano. In the 1980s, she returned to Stanford to perform Aliens Kidnapped Me and Stole My Blood, composed by David Lang, '78, and conducted by her former music professor Arthur Barnes.
"I played whatever anyone wanted me to play," says Cheng. "Composers needed people who could play these esoteric pieces. And it was great to play music by people I knew. I always saw more in the music by knowing the person and learned more about that friend via the music."
In the 1980s she regularly played as orchestra pianist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which provided more chances to work with composers. It was how she met music director Salonen, Boulez and Gyorgy Ligeti, among others.
She made her solo debut with the orchestra in 1998, when she performed Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques. Later, she premiered Salonen's Dichotomie, which he composed and dedicated to her.
In 2003, Boulez, on short notice, asked her to substitute for the taken-ill soloist Mitsuko Uchida at one of the final concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was about to be replaced as the Philharmonic's home by the Walt Disney Concert Hall. "I couldn't say no," Cheng says, but she acknowledged that saying yes meant mastering a tremendously difficult piece by Messiaen in a few days. "Music like that doesn't stay on your fingers or brain like a Beethoven sonata."
KATHERINE SELIGMAN, '75, is a writer in San Francisco.
