Gloria Cheng has appeared as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Ojai Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Festival der Kunste Bad Gleichenberg (Austria), Opus Novum (Honolulu), Getty Center for the Humanities, Composers, Inc. (San Francisco), and Composer-to-Composer Festival (Telluride). As a favorite guest artist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its New Music Group, Ms. Cheng has been featured in concerts honoring Elliott Carter, Gyorgy Ligeti, Pierre Boulez, Toru Takemitsu, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, Witold Lutoslawski, and many others. She has twice been featured with the New Music Group at Alice Tully Hall, and appeared with the L.A. Philharmonic in December, 1998, performing Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques and Couleurs de la cité céleste under the direction of Zubin Mehta.

In 1987 Ms. Cheng was one of three finalists in an international competition for the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain. This led to her engagement at the 1989 Ojai Festival, and again in 1992 and 1996, as a featured soloist at the special request of Music Director Pierre Boulez. Following her performances of his work at the 1996 Ojai Festival, Mr. Boulez composed a solo work for Ms. Cheng, entitled Courtes dérives à partir d’Éclat. In 1992 she won the performer competition of the League of Composers/ISCM, culminating in a critically acclaimed solo recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in February 1993. She was a longtime member of the California E.A.R. Unit and Xtet, and appears annually on the Piano Spheres concert series in Pasadena, California. The composers who have written works for her include John Adams, Mark Applebaum, Pierre Boulez, Joan Huang, David Raksin, Terry Riley, Chinary Ung, and Andrew Waggoner.

Ms. Cheng’s first solo CD was a highly praised recording of music by Olivier Messiaen released in 1995. Her second solo CD, of Piano Works of John Adams and Terry Riley (featuring the world premiere recording of Riley’s The Heaven Ladder, Book 7), was released by Telarc in 1998 to great critical acclaim. Upcoming projects on Telarc include a disc of piano dance music, scheduled for release in 2000.

Ms. Cheng’s playing may also be heard in film soundtracks including Jurassic Park, Ghost, Toy Story, Bound, and The Matrix. She has an Economics degree from Stanford University, and graduate degrees in Music from UCLA and USC. Her major teachers were Isabelle Sant’Ambrogio, Aube Tzerko, and John Perry.

She has served as a panelist for the Minnesota Composers Forum and the California Arts Council, and as a Board member of the American Music Center.