Saturday, October 15, 2022
at 7:00 PM

Noël Wan (harp)

Presented in collaboration with Debut Atlantic

 Lauded as “a huge talent [with] hidden power and amazing maturity” (Bart van Oort), Taiwanese-American harpist Dr. Noël Wan made her international debut in 2010 performing Alberto Ginastera’sHarp Concerto with the Utrecht Symphony Orchestra. As a soloist and ensemble harpist, she has performed at the Concertgebouw, the Muziekgebouw, Eslite Hall, Carnegie Hall, Davies Symphony Hall, David Geffen Hall, Yellow Barn Summer Music Festival, and on NPO Radio 4’s Spiegelzaal. She has worked with John Adams, Natasha Brofsky, Valery Gergiev, Eduardo Leandro, Anthony Marwood, John Myerscough, Peter Oundjian, Michael Tilson Thomas, and the Zohn Collective and has premiered works by Krists Auznieks, Daníel Bjarnason, Kyong-Mee Choi, David Feurzeig, Augusta Read Thomas, and Dmitry Tymoczko. She can be heard on her debut solo album The Secret Garden (2010); with the Illinois Modern Ensemble on Dmitri Tymoczko’s album Fools and Angels (2018, Panoramic/New Focus); and forthcoming recordings of Tymoczko’s Lead Sheet (2019) and John Liberatore’s Hold Back Thy Hours (2012).

An international prize-winning harpist, Dr. Wan is the youngest First Prize winner in the history of the Dutch Harp Festival Competition (now World Harp Competition); the only two-time harp recipient of the Chimei Arts Foundation Award (2012, 2015); and the only harpist to have won Grand Prize in the Carmel Music Society Instrumental Competition (2014) and First Prize in the Pacific Musical Society Instrumental Competition (2009). She is also a 2019 Lyon and Healy Award laureate as well as a two-time semi-finalist of the prestigious International Harp Contest in Israel (2009, 2012). Other successes include top prizes in the 2021 Orford Music Award, the 2015 Korea International Harp Competition, the 2013 Nippon International Harp Competition, the 2008 Lily Laskine International Harp Competition, and the American Harp Society National Competition (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015, 2019). Since moving to Canada in 2019, she has been generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

As a scholar and educator, Dr. Wan explores imaginative intersections between the harp, identity, and spaces. Her recent projects include: affect and the environment in the music of Toru Takemitsu and Zhou Long; new materialism and feminist phenomenology in Georges Aperghis’ Fidélité (1982); and narratives of Blackness and love in Leo Brouwer’s El decamerón negro (1981). As a writer, she has contributed to Harp Column, The American Harp Journal, and The Collective, addressing topics of performance practice, music education, philosophy, feminism, and race.

Dr. Wan is an alumna of the University of Illinois (BM, DMA)–where she was a 2016-2019 Illinois Distinguished Fellow–and the Yale School of Music (MM). She has given masterclasses in North America and Asia and has held teaching appointments at the University of Illinois, the University of Notre Dame, and Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana. Since 2020, she has served as Assistant Professor of Harp in Western University’s Don Wright Faculty of Music.

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dr. Wan has since called many other places “home”— Illinois, Connecticut, the Netherlands, and Taiwan. She currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her husband, conductor/composer Patrick Murray, and their loquacious tuxedo cat Georgina.

Learn more at https://nywharp.com

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