Music
Anders Hui, Part-Time Lecturer (HUMA)
Second Associate Concertmaster of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Anders Hui is a native born Hong Kong who was raised in Canada. He won his first major competition in Canada when he was 17 years old in the Canadian Music Competition. He then went to America and received his Masters and Bachelor degree in Indiana University Jacob school of Music studying with Mauricio Fuks and Nelli Shkolnikova. During the years in Indiana, he was the winner of the Brahms Violin Concerto Competition and made his performance under the baton of David Effron. He was also appointed as one of the four Violin Associate Instructors at Indiana University.
He has also broadened his music education by studying with teachers like Cho-Liang Lin, Alex Kerr, Aaron Rosand, Victor Danchenko, and Lewis Kaplan. As well as learning Chamber Music with Janos Starker, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Ik-Hwan Bae, Alex Kerr, Yuval Gotlibovich, Alan DeVeritch, James Campbell, Shigeo Neriki, Andre Watts, and Cliff Colnot.
While he was in America, he was very active as an orchestral player. He was the Assistant Concertmaster and interim Concertmaster for Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra for 2 years, as well as guest Concertmaster in Carmel (IN) Symphony Orchestra. He was also Tutti Violin of the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic.
Last year, he was invited by Christoph Eschenbach to be the Assistant Concermaster for the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival Orchestra to perform with him and soloist Lang Lang in a month-long tour across North America consisting 23 concerts. He was first chosen by him to be the Assistant Concertmaster in 2007, and the following year as the Concertmaster, which had toured around Hungary, Denmark, Brazil, and extensively in Germany. With this orchestra he also had an opportunity to work with other world renowed conductors, such as Herbert Blomstedt, Mikhail Pletnev, Christopher Hogwood, and Ivan Fischer.
Prior in coming back to Hong Kong joining with the HKPO, he has furthered his studying to Germany with Kolja Blacher and Michael Vogler from Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin.
Isaac DROSCHA, Lecturer I (HUMA)
Isaac Droscha is an operatic Bass-Britone who has performed numerous roles with various regional companies in the United States, including the Des Moines Metro Opera, Opera New Jersey, and Arbor Opera Theater, for which he is currently serving as a board member. He has also worked for Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit and The Motor City Lyric Opera on Wheels, and most recently performed as Escamillio in Musica Viva’s production of The Story of Carmen in Hong Kong and as Leporello in a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theater in Prague, CZ. Other major roles from his repertoire include the title roles in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, the Musik Lehrer in Stauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and Dr. Falke in Strauss’ Die Fledermaus.
He is also a prolific concert performer of oratorio and art song and has performed roles in Handel’s Messiah, Faure’s Reqiuem, Mozart’s Reqiuem, and Hayden’s The Creation. He has sung as a soloist with the Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra, the Ann Arbor Symphonette, The Pro Arte Orchestra of Hong Kong. He received fellowships and Scholarships from the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Michigan for Study. He performs recitals regularly in the United States, Russia, and Hong Kong, and is a frequent collaborator with Hong Kong MusicaViva.
Isaac received his Doctorate in Vocal Performance from the University of Michigan and is a member of the academic fraternities Pi Kappa Lambda and Phi Kappa Phi.
Ilari KAILA, Lecturer I (HUMA)
Professor Kaila is a Finnish-born composer and pianist. He joins the music faculty of HKUST from New York, where he has worked at Columbia University and Stony Brook University (State University of New York), teaching harmony, counterpoint, musicianship, and post-tonal music analysis, and as a teaching artist in composition with the New York Philharmonic. During the past concert season, Kaila’s works have been performed in Australia by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; in Japan by the Avanti Chamber Orchestra; in Finland by the Joensuu Symphony Orchestra and the Zagros Ensemble; at the Banff Centre Summer Arts Festival in Canada; and at the MATA Festival in New York City; among others. He was also one of six young Composer Fellows featured at HKUST’s Intimacy of Creativity programme in the spring of 2014. As a pianist, he has performed in premieres of his own and other young composers’ works, and in various improvisation and stage projects.
Mandy PETTY, Part-time Teaching Associate (HUMA)
Mandy Petty is a fellow and examiner of Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD, UK).
Mandy received her training in Musical Theatre at Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom, England – one of the leading Musical Theatre schools in the UK today. She began working with the Academy since it was founded in 1984. She engaged as a full-time member of staff from 1995 to 2014, teaching Musical Theatre (Jazz & Tap) to the Dance and Drama students. Throughout those years, she choreographed for many dance concerts and musicals at the Academy, and in the private sector. Her credits include Bye Bye Birdie, Pippin, Merrily We Roll Along, 42ndStreet, Crazy for You, South Pacific, Fiddler on gigwatch.co.uk/category/replica-cartier-crash-watches the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun, Vision Party, Annie, The Boyfriend, My Fair Lady, Little Shop of Horrors, The Full Monty, Anything Goes, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Follies, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, to name but a few. Mandy has also worked in the commercial sector, choreographing and performing with local celebrities such as Liza Wang. As a qualified teacher and examiner for of ISTD, UK, Mandy regularly examines, adjudicates and conducts workshops both within Hong Kong and overseas.
Bright SHENG, IAS Helmut and Anna Pao Sohmen Professor-at-Large
The MacArthur Fellow Bright Sheng was born on December 6, 1955, in Shanghai, China, and moved to New York in l982. He is currently the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor at University of Michigan, and Y. K. Pao Distinguished Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at HKUST.
Sheng has collaborated with distinguished musicians such as Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, Christoph Eschenbach, Charles Dutoit, Jaap Van Zweden, Leonard Slatkin, Gerard Schwarz, David Robertson, David Zinman, Neeme Järvi, Robert Spano, Hugh Wolff, Yo Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Chao-Liang Lin, Yefim Bronfman, Evelyn Glennie, among others. He has been widely commissioned and performed by virtually all important musical institutions in North America, Europe and Asia, including the White House, the 2008 Beijing International Olympic Games, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestra de Paris, BBC Symphony, Hamburg Radio Symphony, Danish National Symphony, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Santa Fe Opera, New York City Opera.
Exclusively published by G. Schirmer Inc. in New York City, he can also be heard on Naxos, Sony Classical, Talarc, Delos, Koch International, New World labels and Grammofon AB BIS.
His music ranges from dramatic to lyrical and is strongly influenced by the folk and classical music tradition from eastern and central Asia. Since 2000, he has been studying and researching the music phenomenon of the Silk Road culture. And he also has served as the Artistic Advisor to Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project Inc.
As a conductor and pianist, he has performed with, in the U.S., the San Francisco Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Seattle Symphony, New York Chamber Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic in Russia, Dortmund Philharmonic in Germany, China National Symphony, among others; and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center.
Amy SZE, Part-time Lecturer (HUMA)
Dr. Amy Sze holds the Performer’s Certificate, Doctor and Master of Musical Arts in Piano Performance and Literature, from the Eastman School of Music. Her principal teachers include Nelita True and Gabriel Kwok. She started her musical training at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts at the age of ten. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships, including the Avis D. Vaughn Scholarship, the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Scholarship, and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund Overseas Scholarship.
Amy has appeared as a soloist with orchestras such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and the Eastman Symphony Orchestra. She has also performed in major festivals including the Aspen Music Festival, the Cliburn Piano Institute, the Harbin Summer Music Festival, and the Salzburg Mozarteum Academy. Last summer, she had the privilege of performing the Beethoven Piano Sonatas Marathon in Vienna—two concerts lasting 12 hours—along with celebrated pianists from around the world.
She has been a member of the Eastman Chamber Music Society, which engages in outreach projects and charity concerts in public schools and community centres. An active performer of contemporary music, she has been a featured artist at the Intimacy of Creativity 2017 Contemporary Song Festival, the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival, Le French May Festival, and with Hong Kong New Generation. She has collaborated with such distinguished artists as Derek Bermel, David Childs, Peter Cooper, Benedict Cruft, Yoshiyuki Ishikawa, Raphael Severe, and John Williams.
Amy is currently on the faculty of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Baptist University. Apart from lectures and masterclasses, she frequently serves on the juries for various awards and competitions.
Creative Writing
Zaifu LIU, Tin Ka Ping Outstanding Scholar-in-Residence of Chinese Literature (HUMA)
Liu Zaifu is a renowned writer, critic, scholar, and public intellectual who rose to prominence in China during the early 1980s. He has held numerous high level academic appointments including director of the Institute of Literature in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, editor-in-chief of Literary Review, visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the University of Stockholm, the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor in the Division of Humanities.
A prolific writer, he has published more than 100 books, some are academic and others are books of his literary essays. His representative Chinese language publications include Lu Xun and Natural Science (1976), A Biography of Lu Xun (1981), Lu Xun’s Aesthetic Thought (1981), The Theory of Character Organization (1986), Reflections on Literature (1986), Twenty-Five Kinds of Men (1992), Farewell to Gods (1994), On Gao Xingjian (2000), Four Books on the Dream of the Red Chamber (2006), Brief Theory of Li Zehou’s Aesthetics (2009), On Jia Baoyu (2014), and a ten-volume series entitled Records of Exile (1993-2010). His English publications include: Reflections on the Dream of the Red Chamber (2008), A Study of Two Classics (2012).
Jianmei LIU, Professor (HUMA)
Professor Liu Jianmei is specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and gender studies. She received her BA from Beijing University and her MA (East Asian Languages and Literatures) from University of Colorado at Boulder and PhD (East Asian Studies) from Columbia University. Before joining the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, she was Associate Professor of Chinese literature at University of Maryland.
Lianke YAN, IAS Sin Wai Kin Visiting Professor of Chinese Culture
Yan Lianke was born in a small village of Song County, Henan province in 1958. He joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1978, graduated from Henan University majoring in Political Education in 1985, and received a degree from the Literature Department of the PLA Academy of Art in 1991. He began his writing career in 1979, and his novels include The Passing of Time, As Hard as Water, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Odes and Hymns, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died. As one of contemporary China’s most controversial and influential authors, he has received more than twenty distinguished national and international literature prizes, including the First and Second Lu Xun Literature Prize, the Third Lao She Literature Prize, and the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Award. He was a finalist for the Prince of Asturias Literature Prize and the Prix Femina Literature Prize. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for Lenin’s Kisses in 2013, and was shortlisted again for Four Books in 2016, longlisted for The Explosion Chronicles in 2017. In 2014 he was awarded with the Franz Kafka Literature Prize, and in 2016 his novel The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Literary Prize from Hong Kong. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, French, English, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, and Serbian. Many of these translations have attracted attention and critical acclaim for the novels in their respective literary markets. He is currently a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, and Sin Wai Kin Visiting Professor of Chinese Culture at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Shengqing WU, Associate Professor (HUMA)
Professor Wu’s research concerns the literary and intellectual history of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, particularly classical poetry written in a modern context. An examination of the works and activities of previously neglected poets who maintained their commitment to traditional aesthetic ideals, her first book Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition 1900-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2013), illuminates the splendor of Chinese lyricism and highlights the mutually transformative power of the modern and the archaic. Complementing her passion for poetry (from the classical to the contemporary), her scholarly interests also include the relationship between image and text, questions of gender, and the issue of emotion. She is working on her second book project, which is tentatively titled “Emotion in Transit: Text and Image in Modern China.” Prior to joining the faculty of HKUST, Wu was an associate professor at Wesleyan University, where she taught for eight years. She was the receipt of an An Wang postdoctoral fellowship from the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, a Junior Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Academic Support and Production Staff
Galison LAU, Instructional Assistant (HUMA)
Galison Lau is one of the most active composers in his generation in Hong Kong. He studied with Wing-fai Law, Clarence Mak, and Samuel Lo in Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. He also studied with Leonardo Balada and Fabien Lévy in Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. US.
Mr. Lau’s compositions were performed or broadcasted in many places and events, including New Music From Hong Kong Concert in NYC – the first concert in US for the 20th Anniversary of Hong Kong; Intimacy of Creativity 2017 Contemporary Song Festival; ACL 2013 Singapore; ISCM – ACL World Music Days 2007; Being chosen as one of the pieces from Hong Kong in the 2006 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris; the Lilian Baylis Theatre in Sadlers Wells, London; Musicarama 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2017, in Hong Kong; New Generation 2005, 2006, in Hong Kong.
Galison got several commissions, including Helsyd Piano Trio with Hong Kong New Music Ensemble in 2017; Hong Kong Arts Festival 2014; Spotlight On Young Musicians Concert Series 1 in June 2011; Musicarama 2010, 2012, and 2017 by Hong Kong Composers’ Guild with sponsorship from CASH Music Fund. In 2009, Scents,for string quartet, was chosen to be the first prize of Harry Archer Memorial Scholarship.He also composed a piece for the inauguration of the Wellcome Theatre of the HKAPA in 2006.
His music was performed by renowned ensembles, including Munich Chamber Orchestra; Parker String Quartet; MIVOS Quartet; RTHK Quartet; Varshavsky Shapira Piano Duo; Hong Kong New Music Ensemble.
Roderick YU, Instructional Assistant (HUMA)
Roderick Yu is pianist who takes up different roles in orchestral, opera, chamber music and vocal piano accompanying.
As an active pianist, he was invited to perform with the Collegium Musicum Hong Kong, Guildhall New Music Ensemble, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and HKBDA Wind Orchestra. He has also performed in international music festivals in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Austria and Hong Kong. His performance included Cecilia Heejeong Kim’s My Arirang, How Much I am Missing You (2013), Joyce Tang’s Reflections on Arirang (2013), Nigel Clarke’s The Flavour of Tears (2013), Luis Serrano Alarcón’sThree Sketches (2014) and Brett Dean’s Wolf-Lieder (2006) that has been broadcasted in the BBC Radio 3 in London.
Roderick completed his Master’s Degree with Distinction with the support of Leverhulme Trust at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Bachelor’s Degree at the Hong Kong Baptist University, studied under Caroline Palmer, Graham Johnson, Gordon Back, Pamela Lidiard and Norman Lee. He has received the Scotiabank scholarship to be the Art of Song Fellow during the 2013 Toronto Summer Music Festival, where he received intensive coaching from Elly Ameling, Julius Drake and Michael McMahon. Roderick was trained as a lieder coach by Konrad Jarnot and Christoph Bernerduring the 2014 Internationale Sommerakademie in Universität Mozarteum Salzburg.