When I first got the call that I was an Avery Fisher Career Grant Recipient, I was about to step on stage and do an orchestra rehearsal for a Gershwin concerto.

I was in Wichita and so at that moment, you know, I had so much joy that I think it made the rehearsal more lively.

♪♪ So for me, my formative years were a little bit unconventional, I would say because I didn't go into music with the intention of Oh, I wanted to learn, you know, piano or I wanted to to, to do a craft.

It was more of my mom's decision, and a very luck and wise decision on her part.

I was a very rowdy kid as you know, just running around all the time, getting into trouble, that stuff.

And so she was lookin into babysitters and babysitters were, I think, $25 an hour at that time.

And she saw this ad in the newspape for this Chinatown music school.

It was in the basement of this random building, and it was $30 an hour.

So for this extra $5, you know, I was able to learn a craft and I'd be practicing alone.

And so she would have some more time for herself.

♪♪ And I was very lucky that the first piano teache I had there, which was Miss Zoya she was I think, the best introduction to music that I could have gotten.

It wasn't you know, the usual, Here are the scales, here are the arpeggios, here are the études, and then you work from there.

It was more love the music that you want to play first, and then everything else comes later.

When I started my first lessons in piano, I was seven years old, and at eight years old I was applying for this new outreach program in Juilliard called the Juilliard Music Advancement Program, or the MAP Program.

And for me, just as an eight year old being able to step into Juilliard and just see all these musicians practicing, playing was an eye opening experience.

And for me, one of the things that I love to do at that point in time was listen to the student recitals.

And so I would hear one after the other, you know, just for, you know, five, six hours every Saturday just listening to students.

And these would be people in the Juilliard Pre-College, which were you know, people in their teens.

So it's not that much older than me, but they were playing these full hour length recitals and I was like, oh, my God, how do you how do they do that?

And how can I do that?

So I, you know, told my teacher there her name was Ms. Nam, I want to get into Juilliard Pre-College.

So she, you know, gave me, yo know, extra time free of charge.

She would teach me, you know, two hour lessons, three hour lessons.

And the first year I tried when I was nine, I didn't get in.

But the second year when I was ten, I did get in.

And so at ten, I got into th Juilliard Pre-College program.

And that was a big motivational piece for me.

I think it kind of proved the hard work that I was doing in a sense, just like Avery Fisher is doing for me now.

♪♪ ♪♪ So the piece I'll be performing is Godowksys Symphonic Metamorphosis on Johann Strauss's Fledermaus.

I think when we look at music, there's, I think always the the influence of other musicians on the artist and then from there an inspiration to do more.

And I think that's wher a huge part of the piano genre, which is piano transcriptions come in and these composers dearly loved, you know, these melodies, whether it's from folk songs, whether it's from operas, from ballets.

And they love them so much that they wanted to have them to be able to be played on the piano.

But I think the name “Symphonic Metamorphosis,” what he's getting at is that he is transforming all the melodies that we know so well from Fledermaus into a completely new idea and the metamorphosis that I think for him comes in the fact that he finds so many similarities in the harmonic structure.

What he starts to do is he starts to overlap different melodies from different parts of the aria.

So you get, you know, something from Act II, scene one and then Act I, scene three and they're being sung at the same time.

And then you get this very interesting coexistence of these two melodies that you've never considered before.

♪♪ And I think that's where the metamorphosis comes into, into play.

The symphonic part, I think, is because I never consider, you know, piano like only a percussive instrument.

I really think it's you're mean to portray all the instruments possible on it.

And so I think the symphonic part of that is to remind the pianist not to get too bangy, too pianistic.

It's still you know, after the, the opera, which includes voices, the entire orchestra.

And so you have to represent that in some way, whether it's in the form of colors that you choose, the types of voicings that you do.

And so I think that' why it's such a complicated but kind of fully encompasses what this piece is about.

♪♪ I've really made the decisio to be a musician quite recently when I did the Van Cliburn competition about a year and a half ago.

And so there's all of these thoughts about, you know, projects, about, you know, repertoire that I wan to learn, about collaborations that I really haven't had the time to explore because I was doing so many academic courses while at Harvard.

And so it almost feels like this is the support to go out and do a lot of these these projects that I want to do, which do require, you know, quite a bit of financial support.

And coming from a background which I don't have that much, you know, financial backing, it's quite important for me.

Music in general, you know, musicians, it's quite a difficult caree because we're always struggling to to provide the best arts, you know, the things that would potentially change lives.

This is what we're concerned about.

But then there's also the the big world of, you know, how do we, you know, get the money to fl to a place to, to perform there?

How do we, you know, get th the clothes to look presentable?

How do we make our albums?

How do we ge the recording people together?

It's it's all part of, you know, the project o of bringing yourself out there And I think this Avery Fisher Career Grant definitely helps you make that more possible.

♪♪ When they were writing these transcriptions, it was usually for the middle class who didn't get a chance to go to these operas, to these ballets.

And so how do they listen to, you know, Verdi's new popular aria?

They go and they buy a piano transcription of it, and they'll read it after dinner.

And so this was a big economic incentive for Godowsky as well to make these.