Today we hear from Edie Park, a pianist and supporter of WFMT. She plays Scarlatti, Beethoven and Chopin before finishing her recital with the San Francisco-based composer Jean Ahn.
Edie Park, 15, is a Scholarship Fellow at the Music Institute of Chicago Academy, where she studies piano with Marta Aznavoorian and Winston Choi.
Edie made her orchestral debut with the Northeastern Illinois University Orchestra after winning the 2024 Chicago Chamber Music Festival Concerto Competition. She has been invited to perform at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, Beethoven Haus in Bonn, and Royal Albert Hall in London. She has won several international awards, including First Prize in the Grand Prize Virtuoso International Music Competition, Second Place in the American Protégé International Piano & Strings Competition, and regional and national recognitions in the Sejong Music Competition, Ruth Monte Bach Competition, ISMTA and MTNA Piano Competitions, and the VSA International Young Musicians Program.
She has participated in masterclasses with pianists Stanislav Ioudenitch, Jerome Lowenthal, John Perry, Alan Chow, Jean-Louis Haguenauer, James Giles and Sylvia Wang. A passionate chamber musician, she was in the piano trio Trois Amies, co-coached by Marta Aznavoorian and Richard Hirschl; and is currently in the Amarela Trio with fellow Academy musicians, coached by Mark George and Stefan Kartman.
Besides performing, Edie is deeply committed to music outreach. She oversees community outreach at Musicians for Hope, a non-profit organization founded by Academy students that supports music education in underfunded schools in the Chicago area. As a longtime fan of WFMT, Edie initiated a collaboration between WFMT’s Bach to School program and Musicians for Hope, raising $9,600 to impact eight schools through a dollar-to-dollar matching challenge during WFMT’s 2024 Spring Membership Drive.
At the Latin School of Chicago, Edie founded the Latin Music Initiative, a club dedicated to music-based community service. Now a sophomore, she serves as Features Editor for The Forum, the school’s student-run newspaper, and enjoys photography and volunteering at the Chicago History Museum.
Video: Edie Park playing Jean Ahn’s “Ongheya”.