Our sixteen year old Nita Qiu was just declared the First Place Winner of the Aloha International Piano Competition!! We are all off our heads with joy over this! Nita arrived in Honolulu on Thursday night. The competition in solo literature was the huge opening event in the week-long festival and academy of private lessons, master classes, and performances with top international musicians. Nita performed an exceedingly demanding program of Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin. For the winners' concert, the judges selected her Liszt Transcendental Etude No. 10 in F minor and she will be performing it today at 9:00 pm Minnesota time.
But this is just the beginning of Nita's big adventure in the summer of 2018! Monday night Nita will be performing a full solo recital as a benefit concert for China Service Ventures at a Lutheran Church in Honolulu. It will be the same program and benefit she performed here in Minneapolis on June 10th, at the Mindekirken Norwegian Memorial Church. It is an hour of literature. At the end of the week in Honolulu, Nita will be competing in the concerto competition with one of the great masterpieces of the piano literature, the Chopin Concerto No. 2 in F minor.
From Honolulu, Nita will continue her dramatic and exciting expedition to Miami where she has been accepted to the Frost-Chopin Academy at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami, Florida. There, Nita will compete in the concerto competition with her Chopin concerto. She will perform additional Chopin works in the week-long academy devoted to the works of Chopin, led by a distinguished international faculty.
This past year has been a very important one for Nita. In addition to this international win in Hawaii, in the fall of 2017 she appeared as Guest Artist on the prestigious National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) program, “From the Top” and was a winner of the coveted Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Scholarship Award in conjunction with the program. The previous spring Nita was also named a national winner of a distinguished Career Development Grant from the Chopin Foundation of the United States. As a 2016-2017 Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) Varsity Showcase Young Artist, Nita was selected to perform at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul in a live broadcast. Her previous professional recording at MPR’s Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser Studio was aired twice earlier last season.
Nita is proving, once again, that belief in one's own uniqueness is the fountainhead of all artistic development.
Yours in Music -
Joe & Jo Anne
