… Katherine Chi, who, soloing with the Richmond Symphony, gave the most incisive performance the Carpenter Theatre has seen this season.
Rachmaninoff’s rhapsody is dizzy and insouciant; the composer runs rings around Paganini’s theme, skittering from darkness to light and back.
Appropriately daring, Chi alternately harangued, then implored, then joshed the orchestra, all with a technical ferocity…
Richmond Times Dispatch | February 6, 2012
Pianist Katherine Chi’s crisp performance made Sergei Prokofiev’s first piano concerto sparkle, and the orchestra’s controlled energy built Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” into an explosive finale.
Columbus Alive | December 22, 2011
Canadian pianist Katherine Chi was featured soloist in the middle two selections. In both the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1 the Messiaen Oiseaux exotiques, Chi not only played with technical brilliance but an almost romantic musicality that enhanced the performance of both works.
Oiseaux exotiques transforms the stage into a forest filled with beautiful sounds and raucous ornithological scoldings. Zeitouni reported that nearly 50 different bird calls are replicated in the score.
Columbus Dispatch | March 27, 2011
Chi’s performance was delightful — polished technique, satisfying phrasing, a lovely knack for making each and every note sing out. The Canadian pianist memorized the 10- minute movement, and I hope someday she gets to play it again.
Her “Emperor” was wonderful to hear, for all of the above reasons, but also for the high level of cooperation she shared with Lockington and the orchestra, a meeting of minds toward a common purpose with glowing results that brought the audience to its feet afterward.
Grand Rapids Press, MLive.com | February 5, 2011
The second discovery is Katherine Chi, gold medalist of the 2010 Honens Piano Competition. Ms. Chi sat in with I Musici bringing her control and warmth into Turina’s romantic and richly harmonic Symphonic Rhapsody Op.66. She got to show flashes of her technical power in the brief scherzo allegro vivo section before blending back in with the ensemble.
Ms. Chi showed her chops in a solo performance with a piece written during the Golden Age of Pianism, Godowsky’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss Jr. This show-off piece, full of lightning figurations, arpeggios and change-ups as themes of long beloved waltzes are constructed, deconstructed, and subtly reconstructed adorned with contrapuntal inner linings in motley colours was a treat to hear. Although there is not a hint of clowning in her stage presence, Katherine Chi’s treatment brought out all the fun in this outrageous piece, as though the spirit of Victor Borge were in the hall.
showtimemagazine.ca | October 3, 2010