Pianist Cheung-Yu Mo is the first performing artiste in Hong Kong to have been awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts degree by the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. While studying there, and earlier, at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Mo received numerous honors, which included the Rudolf Serkin Award, the John Elvin Prize, the Joseph and Rosina Lhevinne, Van Cliburn and Paul Jacobs Scholarships, the Starr Foundation Doctoral Scholarship, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund Overseas Scholarship, an honorary prize at the Twelfth Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, as well as the grand prizes of the Oberlin Concerto Competition, the Music Teachers' National Association Ohio Competition, and the Arthur Dann Competition.
Mo's performances in various venues in New York, such as Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, the Juilliard Theater, and the Hunter College Auditorium, were all highly acclaimed, while his live-broadcast concerto debuts at Oberlin's Finney Chapel and Cleveland's Severance Hall also won him critical praise: "Pianist Cheung-Yu Mo made an exciting Severance Hall debut Thursday night…. The evening's highlight was Mo's sparkling performance of the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody…. Blessed with long, slender hands and good musical instincts, Mo had no trouble meeting the demands of the Rachmaninoff showpiece. His bright tone cut through the orchestra easily. His rhythmic vitality energized the performance…." (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland).
Mo’s principal teachers have been John Winther, Robert Shannon, and Yoheved Kaplinsky; other distinguished pianists and pedagogues from whose tutelage he has benefited include Dmitri Bashkirov, Monique Duphil, Marc Durand, Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, Jerome Lowenthal, Karl Schachter, Gyorgy Sebok, Arie Vardi and Zhou Guang-Ren.
In addition to his many solo and chamber music appearances in the US, Mo has, in recent years, concretized in mainland China and Taiwan, performed concertos with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, as well as presented significant, but rarely-performed modern compositions at the Gambit (Maine) and Focus (New York) festivals of contemporary music and in all of his solo recitals. Besides being an active performer, Mo holds a professorship in the piano department of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and also teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
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