Composer Anthony Cheung's Upcoming Highlights - Performances at Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic
Composer Anthony Cheung’s 2025-2026 Season Highlights
Include Performances at Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, and by the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic
July 16, 2025: the echoing of tenses
Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City
Run AMOC* Festival
November 13, 2025: Miller Theatre
Composer Portrait Concert
Performances by Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, JACK Quartet, and Cheung
February 3, 2026: Piano Concerto
World Premiere by Los Angeles Philharmonic
Pianist Gloria Cheng, Conducted by Elim Chan
Curated by Creative Chair John Adams
March 12-17, 2026: The People United ...
Collaborative Orchestration for the New York Philharmonic
Conducted by Gustavo Dudamel
Forthcoming Fall 2025 Album on New Focus Recordings Features Volta
Recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project Conducted by Gil Rose
Plus Debuts at Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Cal Performances, and More
“gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” – San Francisco Chronicle
“intensely colourful, exquisitely wrought ensemble-writing”” – Gramophone
Anthony Cheung’s Performance Schedule: www.acheungmusic.com/schedule
Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, and multiple layers of textural meaning. Praised for “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), Cheung’s work reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre. Critic Paul Griffiths writes that his music’s precision “is responsible for a wealth of sonic magic.” Cheung is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and First Prize at the Dutilleux Competition, among other awards and honors. He served as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra from 2015-17, and was a co-founder, pianist, and artistic director of New York’s Talea Ensemble.
Anthony Cheung’s 2025-2026 concert season features milestone performances and premieres by world-class musicians and leading venues including Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Elim Chan, New York’s Miller Theatre at Columbia University, Berkeley’s Cal Performances, American Modern Opera Company, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, flutist Claire Chase, pianist Gloria Cheng, tenor Paul Appleby, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and more. In addition, Cheung’s recent orchestral piece Volta will be included on a new album featuring Brown University faculty, to be released in fall 2025 on the New Focus Recordings label, recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) conducted by Gil Rose. This new recording follows the five portrait albums of Cheung’s music which are already available on the New Focus, Kairos,Wergo, and Ensemble Modern labels, along with additional releases on Warner Classics, Tzadik, and Mode.
On July 16, 2025, Anthony Cheung’s multi-movement, large-scale song cycle the echoing of tenses will be performed at Alice Tully Hall as part of the Run AMOC* Festival, a monthlong slate of opera, dance, and music curated and produced by AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) within Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City. In the echoing of tenses, Cheung sets the texts of seven prominent intergenerational Asian-American poets – Victoria Chang, Cathy Park Hong, Li-Young Lee, Arthur Sze, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn. At Lincoln Center, the performance features musicians from the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) including tenor Paul Appleby and violinist Miranda Cuckson, with the composer on piano/keyboards, sound design by David Bird, and live readings by Victoria Chang, Arthur Sze, Jenny Xie, and Monica Youn. The work was commissioned by the Ojai Festival and AMOC in 2022 and presented in New York at the 92nd Street Y in 2023.
The echoing of tenses is a series of reflections and ruminations on memory. Cheung writes:
Memory here is made complicated by the circumstances and tensions of cultural and personal identity, family, migration, loss, and reflection. Opening with Arthur Sze’s “The Network,” which presents the image of a photograph lost to history – a kind of origin story of Asian-American immigration – the cycle begins by looking backwards. But in ensuing texts by Jenny Xie and Cathy Park Hong, past/present/future tenses elide and become confused in dreamlike states. Ocean Vuong’s “The Gift” converses with Li-Young Lee’s earlier poem of the same title, turning to striking childhood memories of each author’s mother and father, respectively. Monica Youn’s raw but dispassionate style contrasts strongly with the emotionally vulnerable explorations of intergenerational trauma in Victoria Chang’s “Obit” and the epistolary “Dear Memory.” Xie’s poems from “The Rupture Tense” share Chang’s exploration of postmemory, which Marianne Hirsch defines as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”
Also this season, JACK Quartet continues performing Cheung’s Twice Removed, a piece the ensemble commissioned and premiered in fall 2024 in celebration of its 20th anniversary, at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival on August 1, 2025 and presented by Cal Performances in Berkeley, CA on March 15, 2026. Twice Removed is a set of reflections on artworks that are themselves responses to other works. Each movement draws inspiration from a different artistic dialogue: “Stretto House” responds to Steven Holl's architecture inspired by Bartók's music; “830 Fireplace Road” engages with John Yau's poetic variations on Jackson Pollock’s words; “Meditation on Motion” reflects on Dean Rader’s poems about Cy Twombly's visual art; and “Journey to Mount Tamalpais” contemplates Etel Adnan's written and visual meditations on the iconic Marin Hills peak. A recording with JACK will follow in 2026.
Anthony Cheung’s Clocks for Seeing will be performed by Collage New Music in Boston, MA in November 2025, with additional performances by other groups planned later in the season. The piece is inspired by Roland Barthes' meditation from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography on the relationship between time, sound, and visual mechanisms, particularly his observation that early cameras were “clocks for seeing,” and continues Cheung’s exploration of alternative tunings. The piece was commissioned for the Talea Ensemble by Chamber Music America in 2023.
Another highlight of Cheung’s concert season in New York will be his Miller Theatre Composer Portrait, a concert dedicated entirely to his music, on November 13, 2025, with performances by Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, and JACK Quartet, with Cheung at the piano. The program includes an Improvised Intro on keyboards performed by Cheung, Twice Removed performed by JACK Quartet, Tactile Values performed by Yarn/Wire, and The Real Book of Fake Tunes performed by flutist Claire Chase and JACK Quartet. Tactile Values for two pianos/keyboards and two percussionists is dedicated to the musicians of Yarn/Wire, and explores concepts of dimensionality and sensory translation, drawing inspiration from Bernard Berenson's writings on how painters construct third dimensions through “tactile values” and Carolee Schneemann's ideas about transforming bodily experiences into “painterly, tactile translation edited as a music of frames.” Cheung composed The Real Book of Fake Tunes for Claire Chase and the Spektral Quartet in 2015. He writes that the title references, “the infamous Real Book that has served as a gateway anthology and/or gig enabler for so many aspiring jazz musicians since the 70s [but] belies a formal architecture of five movements with distinctive characteristics.”
In Los Angeles, on February 3, 2026, pianist Gloria Cheng and the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Elim Chan will give the world premiere of Cheung’s new piano concerto at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of the Green Umbrella series, curated by Creative Chair John Adams. Of the new piece, Cheung says, “Gloria Cheng is a legendary and much-admired presence on the Los Angeles new music scene as well as a good friend, and I was absolutely honored when she and John Adams asked me to write this new concerto commissioned in her honor as part of the LA Phil’s Green Umbrella series. The piece will be my second piano concerto — again with chamber orchestra, but more contemplative in character than its predecessor. It also engages certain corners and cornerstones of the piano repertoire through alternative and reimagined histories.”
Cheung will also write a new chamber work commissioned by Winsor Music as part of their Lineage project on March 1, 2026, and will serve as mentor composer for their Opus 1 Project, working with young musicians in Boston to co-compose a new piece together.
Anthony Cheung will also contribute to the collectively orchestrated version of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, which will have its premiere performances from March 12-17, 2026 at David Geffen Hall. Cheung joins the other selected composers – Kati Agócs, Marcos Balter, Brittany J. Green, Tania León, Andrew Norman, Maria Schneider, Nina Shekhar, Roberto Sierra, Conrad Tao, Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, Joel Thompson, Wang Lu, and Nina C. Young – in interpreting the Chilean protest anthem as a hymn to the power of communities to effect social change.
Anthony Cheung’s music has been commissioned by leading groups such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ICE, Yarn/Wire, Atlas Ensemble, and American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), and performed by the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW, and more. His recent projects have included Well with New Chamber Ballet, the field remembers with the Parker Quartet and Fleur Barron, and premieres with JACK Quartet and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Cheung has also written for flutists Claire Chase and Denis Bouriakov, the Escher and Spektral Quartets, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Jennifer Koh, and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, David Kaplan, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan.
Cheung’s recordings include five portrait discs: All Roads (New Focus, 2022), Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022), Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). His music and performances have also appeared on Warner Classics (performed by Bertrand Chamayou), Tzadik, and Mode.
Anthony Cheung received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He previously taught at the University of Chicago and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses on topics ranging from theory and composition to the jazz orchestra and Asian musical modernisms.
Concert details are available on Anthony Cheung’s performance schedule: www.acheungmusic.com/schedule
For more information about Anthony Cheung: www.acheungmusic.com/about