Breathtaking silence in the hall. One is sitting with the back to the piano, one is sitting under the piano. Others are just harking while sitting around the young pianist. Whenever Hanni Liang plays piano, she opens her soul to the music and to her audience and enchant her listeners with a unique experience.
“We want to experience the music together. Everyone on his individual way. While sitting, while lying with the eyes closed or opened. Tonight everything is possible.”
That’s how the young pianist is motivating her listeners to create an inimitable experience of music. Hanni Liang is not only known for her exceptional musical sense, her brilliant technique, but also for her fascination for the tone colors and her individual interpretations.
Liang’s virtuosity, young freshness, and her charismatic presence on the stage are regularly praised by the journalists of the music world. But to her the integration of her audience to the music is more important.
“For me, music means being free. So my listeners should feel free as well while listening and experiencing my music. There shouldn’t be any rules or seating arrangements.”
Hanni Liang was born in Bielefeld, Germany in 1993 into a not-musical family. She got her first piano lesson when she was eight years old and became a young student of Prof. Barbara Szczepanska after rapid progresses, followed by many prices and concerts. Among them first prizes at the “Rotary Piano Competition”, the “Van Bremen Piano Competition” and the “Concorso Pianistico Internazionale di Roma” Concerts take her for example to Austria, China, Spain, Italy or Poland where she took part in the “International Music Festival Chopin” or the „Tianjin Piano Festival“. Furthermore she travels regularly for concerts to Switzerland for example to the „BSI Engadin Festival“ and to distinguished Music festivals in Germany under them the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Best of NRW, Schumannfest and Gezeitenkonzerte. She finished her Bachelor of music and an additional Bachelor of Mediamanagement at the Robert Schumann Conservatory and the Conservatory of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover.
In 2010 she has been elected the “Young Steinway Artist” and was given a Steinway advancement award. Furthermore she was given sponsorships of e.g. the Dörken Stiftung, the Association for Westphalia Cultural Work, Bechstein and the Richard Wagner Foundation.
Since 2013 she is a successful TONALi-Musician and has therefore distinguished qualities in musical communication. TONALi shaped her further career development and affected her figure in art, as well as her musical engagement, to generate more young listeners for classical music and to achieve cultural education.
Her close collaboration with the prestigious German composer Manfred Trojahn led to the premier of his piano piece “Leise Gondeln” and developed not only into a deep friendship, but also to a recording of Trojahn’s “Six Préludes” in 2015. Hanni Liang describes her debut CD with the following words:
“The Préludes which are based on Debussy are full of tone colors and atmospheres which fascinate me and everyone else who listens to the music. It’s like being under a hypnotical spell.”
The regularly collaboration with the Swiss-Uruguayan Pianist Homero Francesch shaped her musical understanding essentially. Further influences also came from distinguished musicans like Bernd Goetzke, Jacques Rouvier and John Perry.
Since 2016 she is studying under Prof. Matthias Kirschnereit.
The season 2015/16 sees Liang in a two week tour through China which includes also concerts in China’s most important concert halls like the Forbidden City Hall in Peking, Tianjin Concert Hall and the Qintai Concert Hall in Wuhan. Besides she will take part in the German Week, organized by TONALi in the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg. In July she is honored to moderate the big finale of TONALi 2016 in the great Laeiszhalle Hamburg.
