GUEST ARTIST
• Warren LEE (Guest Pianist 2014, 2017 | Hong Kong, China)
• Isabelle RIBOT (Guest Painter 2017 | France)
WARREN LEE
– Guest Pianist
Since his televised début with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of six, Hong Kong-born pianist Warren Lee embarked on a lifelong career in music, both on and off the stage. The South China Morning Post wrote after his performance with the Macau Chamber Orchestra in 1988, “Warren Lee’s performance bore out the insight… that exceptional artists are not so much people to be praised as phenomena to be treasured, bearers of a power altogether greater than the poor vessels that contain it.” His life as a child prodigy was documented on Hong Kong Television Broadcasts’ Sunday’s File in 1993, which has become a teaching reference on “gifted education” in universities.
A scholar graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and Yale School of Music, Warren was the first-prize winner of the 1995 Stravinsky Awards International Piano Competition and the Grand Prix Ivo Pogorelich, as a result of which he made his European début at the Pogorelich Festival in Germany at the age of 18. Hailed by The Straits Times as a musician with “superb pianism… a wonderful sense of colour and impeccably controlled articulation”, Warren’s artistry has brought him to concert halls on four continents, gracing stages of all sizes and forms, and in collaboration with leading international artists and orchestras.
Warren’s discography includes multiple acclaimed albums of solo and chamber music repertoire on Universal Music (Hong Kong) and Naxos. The American Record Guide calls him a “first-rate artist”. A Steinway Artist since 2009, he was among the first artists to record on Steinway’s SPIRIO upon its launch in 2016.
Currently the Music Director of St. Paul’s Co-educational College which received the Yale School of Music Cultural Leadership Citation in 2016, Warren co-currently serves as a guest professor at the Central Conservatory of Music EOS Orchestra Academy, the Hong Kong Representative of Royal Academy of Music, as well as an adjunct faculty and guest artist in various institutions around the world. He also hosts a programme on Radio Television Hong Kong Radio 4, which he has a long-standing relationship with since his début broadcast in 1991.
As a versatile composer, Warren’s choral works have been gaining an international reputation, with works performed and published in Asia, Europe and North America. His work House Rules, based on the Nokia ringtone, won the 2nd Prize of the Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award in Switzerland in 2013. Adding to his expanding catalogue that encompasses various genres, his series of sight-reading method, Sight-Reading Plus, was published in 2015.
With a vision of bettering the community through the art, Warren enjoys a long history of engagement in charity projects with organizations such as the Yale-China Association, SAR Philharmonic, Sowers Actions and Music Children Foundation. In recognition of his achievements in the fields of performing arts and education, Warren received the Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award in Hong Kong in 2012 and was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in 2015.
***************************************************************
ISABELLE RIBOT
– Guest Painter
She discovered Brazil for the first time in 1986 and that country became a real source of inspiration. She spent a time in São Paulo and feelings arose. This was the starting point of her creative universe.
That intense and emotional experience surprised her. She was enchanted by the idea of the nostalgy and the future cohabiting in the huge city. And there, she met amazing people.
Sao Paulo is like a mosaic of untied but fertile worlds…
At the beginning, there is a text, a short story. .. which Isabelle Ribot draws and paints on paper or canvas rolls.
Small or big characters start appearing, colors, invented maps, symbols start filling the scene… the initial scenario becomes a tale, then a journey which offers different faces and various paths.
Listening, loving, dreaming, inventing are the words that illustrate this fantasy along with deep and meaningful colors – the reds, lavenders, blues, pinks, greys, blacks and whites…
Sometimes, these new artwork pieces start a life of their own and give birth to a new story.
The paintings can also become games through reproductions of them.
A game is a representation which acts as a metaphor. It translates the adventures told in a painting into an object.
Or it plays a role just like an anedoct.
These pieces work like games governed by rules never quite clear, and often related to chance.
Isabelle Ribot’s works turns itself into an interactive experience.