Leah Kang

Pianist Leah Kang (D.M.A.) is a musician of diverse interests who received degrees in biology and public health at the University of California, Los Angeles prior to pursuing professional studies in music. She has performed in the United States, Germany, Austria, France, Canada, Czech Republic, and has been featured as a soloist with the Antelope Valley Symphony Orchestra, Tehachapi Symphony Orchestra, and the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra in concertos by Beethoven and Chopin. She has been awarded prizes in the International Siegfried Weishaupt Piano Competition and the American Prize Competition for Piano Performance (professional division). Her performances have been broadcast on SWR2 of Germany and WFMT in Chicago. Performance engagements include venues and concert series such as Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, Les Dimanches Musicaux, Peninsula Music Festival, Concerts at the Crane, Epiphany Tuesday Concerts, Sunset Music and Arts, Banff Centre’s Rolston Hall, Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, American Cathedral in Paris, Mozarteum’s Wiener Saal, the Schweikher House, the Stoughton Opera House, and many more. A dedicated teacher, Kang has served on the music faculties of Antelope Valley College and Citrus College, as Associate Instructor of Music Theory at Indiana University Bloomington, and a piano instructor for the School of Music and Division of Continuing Studies at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She currently teaches piano and music appreciation at Joliet Junior College and College of DuPage. She is also frequently invited as an adjudicator for competitions and auditions throughout California, Illinois, and Wisconsin. As a two-time recipient of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) research fellowship, Kang spent her dissertation years as a visiting scholar at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. Her research explores arrangements of Beethoven’s works as created by his close contemporaries. She performed a lecture recital premiering rare chamber music arrangements of Beethoven's overtures Egmont, Leonore No. 3, and Prometheus in the US and has presented aspects of her research at international conferences such as “Beethoven-Perspektiven” (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, Germany), "Beethoven 2020: Analytical and Performative Perspectives" (Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory, Amsterdam, Netherlands), and the World Piano Conference (Novi Sad, Serbia). Current interests involving pioneering French women composers from the early twentieth century have been supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. Kang earned her Master of Music and Performer Diploma in Piano Performance from Indiana University Bloomington and her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary mentors include pianists Arnaldo Cohen and Christopher Taylor. Additional studies and masterclasses have been with artists such as Richard Goode, Leif Ove Andsnes, Bernd Goetzke, Daniel Pollack, and Jerome Lowenthal. For more information, please visit: https://www.leahkang.com / [email protected] / https://www.youtube.com/@leahkang