Ryan Jannak-Huang, 13, is a scholarship recipient and member of the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy program where he studies piano with Brenda Huang for 7 years. He was named the MTNA state winner, and the first prize winner at the Awards competition in 2010.  He was also a winner of 2010 Virginia Geyser Behrendt Piano Solo Scholarship. He won the first prize at the Society of American Musicians Competition,  and  the Confucius Music Festival. Ryan was a selected winner in the Fifth Annual DePaul Concerto Festival for Young Performers and played with Oistrach Symphony Orchestra. In addition to reading books, he likes to play piano duet and tennis with his twin brother. Ryan is currently a seventh grader at Walter R. Sundling Junior High School in Palatine.

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Misook Kim received her B.A. with the honor of Cum Laude from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. After finishing her “New Star Concert” sponsored by the Cho-sun Newspaper, she entered the graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin where she completed her M.M. and D.M.A. degrees in composition and the certificate of piano performance. Reviewer Mike Greenberg, writing in the San Antonio Express-News, called the composer ‘a bold and unrepentant modernist’. He also has mentioned ‘each of her works presented thus far has impressed with its fearless modernism, its concision and its strong individual profile’.

Kim has performed as a composer as well as a pianist in various concerts of her own works from solo to larger ensemble compositions throughout the States and Korea. Including commissions for the MUSICOPIA Concert, Olmos Ensemble, she has won International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) Judith Zaimont Award and the Long Island Arts Council International Composition Competition in 2007. She was a former faculty member at The University of the Incarnate Word and Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She had also served as a music director at KUMC. In Fall 2006, Kim joined the faculty at the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College, IL.
website: www.misookkim.org

Qwe-Ji-Na Ching-Ching Na-Ne was originally meant for shaman rituals, but it became a folk song of the Kyoung-Sang Province. It starts with a slow tempo while the two main themes keep repeating as a call and response between two contrasting dynamics and registers of piano. The finale is a fast and wild ride to the very end.