Clara Schumann
Scherzo No. 1 in D minor, Op. 10
Scherzo No. 2 in C minor, Op. 14
PIANIST & CURATOR · LONDON
Shihua Liu刘诗华
Shihua Liu is a London-based pianist whose work brings together solo performance, chamber music and concert curation.
She received an Artist Diploma from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2026, studying with Alexandra Dariescu, following bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Alongside her performing career, she develops thematic recitals and artistic projects that explore the relationships between repertoire, ideas and audiences.
Read the full artist biography
Shihua Liu is a London-based pianist. She received an Artist Diploma from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2026, studying with Alexandra Dariescu. She previously completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, studying with Danwen Wei, Head of the Piano Department, and Yuan Sheng, who leads the Conservatory’s principal piano teaching section. Before entering the Central Conservatory, she studied with Jingyi Lu, head of piano accompaniment and coaching within its Orchestral Instruments Department. She has also received guidance from Yingdi Sun, Hong Xu, Robert McDonald, Graham Scott, Boris Slutsky, Klaus Baessler and Michael Lewin, and has studied chamber music extensively with Jiajia Shi.
Liu was awarded the Silver Prize in the piano category of the CCTV Piano and Violin Competition. Her other distinctions include First Prize at the Hong Kong International Youth Arts Festival Piano Competition, as well as Second Prize and First Prize for Chinese Works at the 12th Hope Cup Youth Piano Competition. She has participated in international music festivals and artistic exchanges in the United States and Europe, including the International Keyboard Institute & Festival in New York and Music Fest Perugia in Italy.
Liu has performed in both China and the United Kingdom. In China, she has appeared at major venues including the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Taihu Theatre at the NCPA Taihu Stage Art Centre, Chengdu City Concert Hall, Harbin Grand Theatre, Changsha Concert Hall, Shanxi Grand Theatre and Quanzhou Grand Theatre. Her festival and concert appearances include the NCPA May Festival, China International Youth Art Week, the “Autumn in Chengdu” International Music Season, the Beijing Music Festival’s Future Night series, developed in collaboration with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and the Beijing CBD Music Season. An experienced chamber and collaborative pianist, she has worked with violinist Siqing Lu and a range of other established and emerging musicians.
Beyond the concert stage, Liu has appeared in major television and media productions, including China Media Group’s National Treasure and My Art List, as well as a special May Fourth Youth Day concert presented by Xinhua News Agency. She has also performed in programmes for Phoenix Television and at major cultural and diplomatic events, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ New Year Reception and a Spring Festival gathering hosted by the Western Returned Scholars Association. She has appeared on numerous occasions in the NCPA May Festival’s outreach concerts.
Alongside her performing career, Liu develops and curates artistic projects. In 2020, she curated Waves into the Sea, an online graduation concert series for the Piano Department of the Central Conservatory of Music. More than twenty concerts were broadcast on national platforms including CCTV’s Yangshipin and CCTV News, collectively attracting more than 100 million views and receiving extensive national media coverage.
In her own performing practice, Liu continues to develop thematic recital projects exploring a broad range of repertoire, including works by women composers and other historically overlooked repertoire. In 2026, she presented Voices Unveiled, a recital project centred on women composers, in a series of performances in London, bringing together works from different periods and cultural traditions. Through these projects, she seeks to bring greater attention to a broader range of voices within the classical tradition and to explore how such repertoire can be presented in a contemporary context.
A RECITAL PROJECT BY SHIHUA LIU
Voices Unveiled
A Journey through Women’s Music
The project
Voices Unveiled brings together works by women composers across centuries, tracing a history that has not always been heard.
These pieces have long existed at the margins — often overlooked, sometimes obscured, yet never entirely absent.
Through this project, I listen to them not as exceptions, but as something that has always been there — a presence that moves quietly through time, shaped by different lives, different circumstances.
From the silences and constraints of the nineteenth century, to voices gradually coming into view, and to expressions that continue to unfold today, these works begin to resonate with one another — and continue, quietly, to move forward.
Shihua Liu
VOICES UNVEILED
Programme
PART I
In the Shadow of Giants
Fanny Mendelssohn
Piano Sonata in G minor, H-U 395
- Allegro molto agitato
- Scherzo – Adagio
- Finale. Presto.
PART II
A Room of Her Own
Mel Bonis
Femmes de légende
- Mélisande
- Desdémona
- Ophélie
- Viviane
- Phoebé
- Salomé
- Omphale
Marie Jaëll
Six esquisses romantiques
- Les Ombres
- Toccata
- Métamorphoses
- Fantasca
- Contraste
- Le Tournoi
PART III
Resonant Futures
Judith Weir
The Art of Touching the Keyboard
Chen Yi
Duo Ye
CURATORIAL REFLECTIONS
Inside Voices Unveiled
I · CLARA SCHUMANN & FANNY MENDELSSOHN
In the Shadow of Giants
In Clara’s music, I hear emotion held within a heightened sense of control. Energy accumulates beneath the surface; even at its most surging, its force remains contained within structure and touch. Rather than creating tension through rupture, her writing compresses and intensifies each moment from within.
Fanny’s Piano Sonata in G minor unfolds differently. Its gestures are more direct and less stable, at times approaching the edge of imbalance. It feels as though the music is constantly pressing outward from within an existing framework, testing how far it can reach.
One draws inward, sustaining tension within constraint; the other continues to press outward, extending the space it inhabits. They unfold alongside each other within the same history.
II · MEL BONIS & MARIE JAËLL
A Room of Her Own
To me, finding a voice does not feel like a sudden act of breaking away, but something quieter — a way of expression slowly growing from within the musical world already around it.
In Mel Bonis’s Femmes de légende, the music opens inward. The women drawn from myth and literature do not feel simply described; they seem to be gently brought into presence through sound. Colour, line and emotion weave together beneath the fingers. These figures feel close — like different states, or perhaps different possibilities of the same self.
With Marie Jaëll’s Six esquisses romantiques, my listening shifts towards how sound comes into being beneath the hands. Touch, weight, line and sonority draw closer together, as if the music is being shaped from within the act of playing itself.
III · JUDITH WEIR & CHEN YI
Resonant Futures
By this point, I find myself thinking less about women composers as a category, and more about the ways each of them continues to reshape what music can be.
In Judith Weir’s The Art of Touching the Keyboard, the music seems to trace the gradual formation of a relationship between a player and an instrument. From tentative first encounters to a growing sense of touch, listening and trust, each sound feels newly discovered.
Chen Yi’s Duo Ye brings another kind of energy. Rather than recreating the traditional Dong song and dance from which it takes its inspiration, it transforms that vitality into a new musical language for the piano. Singing, dancing and communal celebration pulse beneath the surface, in a dialogue between memory and reinvention, tradition and the present.
These works also connect the two worlds that have shaped my own musical journey: the United Kingdom, where I now live, and China, where that journey began. I hear them as voices within the same continuing musical conversation.
The voices remain. The journey continues.
Reflections by Shihua Liu