Director of Piano/Theory

Amber Yiu-Hsuan Liao
Biography

Pianist Amber Yiu-Hsuan Liao has given recitals and solo performances throughout United States and Taiwan.  Recent engagements include recitals at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center in NYC, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the National Concert Hall in Taiwan and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, and the world premiere of Between Stream and Hills III for piano solo by Chih-Chen Wei.  Dr. Liao’s recording of works by Schumann, Beethoven and Granados was recently released on the MSR Classics label.  She has been invited to participate in several music festivals in Europe, including Courchevel Academie Musicale in France, Internationale Sommerakademie Mozarteum in Salzburg and New Millenium Piano Festival in Gijón, Spain.  She has also been selected to perform in the master classes of distinguished artists such as Leon Fleisher, Dmitri Bashkirov, John Perry, Leslie Howard, Oxana Yablonskaya, Michel Béroff and Robert McDonald. 
As a chamber musician, Dr. Liao’s collaborations with vocalists and instrumentalists have led to performances in the CAMI Hall, Symphony Space and the Lenox Athenaeum, among others.  She was the pianist in the Emerald Quintet, a group dedicated to both standard repertoire and the works of contemporary composers.
Dr. Liao started her early music training in Taiwan.  As a teenager, she was the prize winner of several regional and national composition competitions.  She continued her studies in piano performance in the United States under the tutelage of Boris Slutsky and Arkady Aronov.  A winner of the Rose Marie Milholland Award and the President’s Award, she received her Master of Music from the Peabody Institute and Doctor of Musical Arts from the Manhattan School of Music.  Dr. Liao taught at Montclair State University and Seton Hall University, before joining the faculty of the Horne School of Music at Snow College as the Director of Piano/Theory area in 2011.