Prof. XU Hong
Associate Professor
XU Hong is currently an Associate Professor and the Assistant to Division Head of Piano & Keyboard Division at the School of Music of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He is an internationally renowned pianist, a council member of the Piano Society of the China Musicians Association, the Artistic Director of the New Zealand International Piano Festival, and a Visiting Professor at the Wuhan Conservatory of Music.
He studied at the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School in the United States. As a prize winner of international competitions such as Honens, Bachauer, and Hilton Head, he has studied with many renowned professors, including Jiang Liping, Douglas Humpherys, Jerome Lowenthal, and Robert McDonald. The New York Times has praised him as "a Chinese pianist with brilliant technique, insightful musicianship with unlimited potential!"
He has performed with many world-class musicians, such as Ashkenazy, Pletnev, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Sir Mark Elder. He was invited by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra, and the China National Centre for the Performing Arts Orchestra to tour both domestically and internationally. Additionally, he collaborated with many world-renowned ensembles, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Russian National Symphony Orchestra, the Portuguese National Symphony Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Macedonian National Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra in China. His performances have taken him to many prestigious venues around the world, such as the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican Centre, the Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Montreal Arts Centre, the Seoul Arts Centre, the National Centre for the Performing Arts, the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, the Taipei Concert Hall, and many other major concert halls across China.
From 2010 to 2023, he taught at the Piano Department of the Wuhan Conservatory of Music, where his students achieved remarkable results. His online Piano Masterclass received widespread acclaim and became one of the longest-running public piano courses on the Internet.
As a public speaker, he has given lectures and masterclasses in many institutions both in China and abroad, including the Eastman School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and New York University in the United States; Trinity College of Music in London; the University of Auckland in New Zealand; the University of Melbourne in Australia; the Seoul National University in South Korea; and the Central Conservatory of Music, Taiwan University of the Arts, Xi'an Conservatory of Music, Xinghai Conservatory of Music, and Zhejiang Conservatory of Music in China. Every summer, he teaches at the International Piano Festival in Amalfi, Italy and the Leon Fleisher Festival in Washington D.C. In the winter, he serves as the Director of the New Zealand International Piano Festival.
He has also made great efforts to promote new music and has given world premieres of works by Frederic Rzewski and Gao Ping. Over the years, XU Hong has been dedicated to the study of Mozart's music. In the future, he will record several Mozart albums.
