Singaporean pianist Churen Li seeks innovative and personal approaches to concert programming, combining diverse genres with improvisatory and experimental practices. The 2021 season included debuts at the Singapore International Piano Festival and Singapore International Festival of Arts, as well as more than 80 solo concerts with the Candlelight series that featured an eclectic repertoire from Chopin and Debussy, to Michael Jackson, John Williams, and George Crumb.
In 2015, she performed as soloist in a tour of Macau and Hong Kong with the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music Orchestra, at the invitation of Singapore’s High Consulate in Hong Kong as part of Singapore’s 50th jubilee celebrations of independence. Other concerto engagements include performances with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Klassische Budapest Philharmonic, Metropolitan Festival Orchestra Singapore, Cambridge University Orchestra and National University of Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
Churen is also passionate about new music, having experimented increasingly with combining musical genres, as well as reflecting on the relationship between musical and societal evolution. In September 2018, she co-produced and performed in a sold-out concert at Zouk, a popular nightclub in Singapore, juxtaposing Western art music in a contemporarily subversive environment. As part of a tour of the UK in 2020, she co-produced a cabaret show of musical theatre, pop and classical music written by Singaporean composers, presented in conjunction with the Singapore Consulate of UK. She was among the ten pianists selected in 2018 to participate and perform in the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music, and in the same year, at the Roche Continents programme in Salzburg, an interdisciplinary programme of workshops and lectures in the arts and in science.
Churen attained her Bachelor’s Degree from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (National University of Singapore), where she graduated aged 19 as the youngest of her cohort. She attained her two Masters Degree (in music and in philosophy, respectively) from Yale University and Cambridge University. At the latter, she presented her dissertation on “An Autoethnographic Approach to the Analysis of George Crumb’s Five Pieces for Piano”. Churen is currently an Artist Fellow at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music. Her past teachers include Albert Tiu, Bernard Lanskey, Paul Liang, Peter Frankl and Hung-Kuan Chen.