By Nick Muzyczka

Sun Mei-Ting will give five more performances in Shanghai. Photo: Courtesy of Sun Mei-Ting

One of Shanghai's contributions to the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth is the marathon series of concerts by Chinese-American pianist Sun Mei-Ting, who is currently working his way through the complete Chopin piano solo cycle.

At the opening concert on last Friday, the 29-year-old Sun began a varied program including etudes, mazurkas and a scherzo. Playing to an almost exclusively Chinese audience, the pianist gave a highly musical and dexterous rendering of Chopin's work. Sun's preference for playing with a conservative amount of sustain pedal made for an unusually clear and pointed performance.

One of the challenges when performing Chopin's solo piano repertoire is being able to control changes in tempos within phrases. Capturing this lilting quality is not easy to accomplish from the outset of a performance, and it took Sun two pieces before he fully relaxed into the music. From that point on, however, the audience was treated to a display of outstanding dynamic control and technical expertise.

Tempo choices were perhaps on the quicker side of average but Sun had no trouble with difficult left-hand passages requiring subtle dynamic phrasing.

The program included a number of Chopin's etudes, which are well-known for being technically demanding. Highly arpeggiated right-hand passages were smooth, consistent and impressive.

The pianist was slightly reticent about bringing out the louder parts of the works until his final piece, the Scherzo No. 3 in C Sharp Minor, which brought the concert to a close in truly epic fashion. Sun played entirely from memory, with no music in sight. Committing all of Chopin's solo piano works to memory is certainly no mean feat.

Sun Mei-Ting began performing at a very early age, taking part in the prestigious Spring of Shanghai Festival in 1986 when he was just 5 years old. A native of Shanghai, Sun left the city when he was 9 years old, moving to New York, where he attended the Professional Children's School and Mannes College of Music.

In May 2006, Sun received his Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from the Juilliard School, under the tutelage of Robert McDonald. He is one of the youngest ever recipients of a Julliard doctorate.

Sun has also involved himself in the world of education, regularly running master classes and lectures at major universities around the world. He is also currently working on a book about the Op. 10 Etudes of Chopin.

Sun has won many prestigious awards, including unanimous first prizes in the 7th National Chopin Piano Competition in 2005 (US) and the first Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition in 2002.

He was awarded a prize for the best performance of a concerto and polonaise in the National Chopin competition, and the best performance of a Schubert sonata in the Minnesota International Competition.

He was also the first prize laureate of the 2002 Bartok-Kabalevsky-Proko-fiev International Piano Competition and the 2006 Morocco International Piano Competition.

The pianist has performed at many of the world's top venues, including the Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center in New York, the Benaroya Hall in Seattle, the Orchestra Hall in Minnesota, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Filharmonia Narodowa in Warsaw and the Obecni Dum in Prague.

Date: May 7, May 9, May 14 to 16,

7:45 pm

Venue: Shanghai Oriental Art Center, 425 Dingxiang Road

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Call 6854-1234 for details

Tickets: 80 to 180 yuan