With Maestro Daniel Meyer after our performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Lexington (Kentucky) Philharmonic at the Singletary Center for the Arts, in February 2008. It was a memorable concert for me as the review stated that I played "with astonishing verve."  Of course, that's easy to do with such a fine orchestra and conductor. My only regret was not having time to visit some of the local horse ranches -- backbone of the Kentucky Derby.

Let us now say a few Words in Praise of Yakyuu (Japanese Baseball).  In December 2007 I was invited to meet the owner of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, Mr. Tsuneaki Miyazaki, at historic Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Having learned of my fandom for the team, Mr. Miyazaki extended a warm personal welcome to this unusual Torakichi ("Tiger-crazy-person"). What I did not expect was a press conference with about 30 Japanese sports page writers and photographers. On the following morning one could see photos of me in all the dailies, mostly being anointed with a Hanshin Tigers cap as a new honorary member of the team. Tigers ganbatte !!!

After a recital at the Tom Lee Music Center in downtown Vancouver, Spring 2006, I performed some four-hand duets of Yoshinao Nakada with my splendid pupil Sabina Park. Chuck Gorling, head of the piano division at Tom Lee, is presenting us with two lovely bouquets.

On a broiling day in August 2006, I visited Hiroshima with the eminent musicologist Michael Tenzer (a colleague at UBC) and his family, pictured here. We dined at a locally famous okonomiyaki restaurant, apparently a favorite hangout of well-known Japanese baseball players. Their souvenir name cards adorn the wall directly behind us. I was pleased as could be when I was given the seat once used by Hanshin Tiger outfielder Tomonori Kanemoto -- a slight brush with international sports fame for this piano player. Little did I realize that, just a year later, I would be given a personal tour of Koshien Stadium where I would see Mr. Kanemoto's locker in person.

In production of my latest CD (chamber music of Rudolf Friml, with violinist Stephanie Chase), listening to playbacks with producer Susan Del Giorno of Koch International, October 2005. It takes three days of playing to produce an unedited recording, during which I will be at the piano for six to eight intensive hours per day. Later Susan will do the arduous work of selecting takes and splicing them together, after which I usually write the program notes myself and help to choose the CD artwork. Recordings are, I feel, my most important work. They will be around long after me! I've been fortunate to enjoy a long relationship with Koch and there are many exciting recording projects ahead.

In the summer of 2005 I was an adjudicator for the International Rudolf Firkusny Piano Competition, in the beautiful city of Prague. It was an honor to be a juror for this competition, named after my beloved teacher at Juilliard and one of the greatest musicians it has been my privilege to know. In this photo of the jury, taken in the Klementinum Library, my head is peeking out from the back of the crowd. They were a distinguished bunch, and I am pleased to report there were no squabbles or fistfights among us.

After my 2004 debut with the McGill Chamber Orchestra in Montreal, with conductor Boris Brott. On this occasion I played three concerti  in one evening: Mozart's Piano Concerto in E flat major KV 449, Joaquin Turina's Rapsodica Sinfonica, and Hindemith's "The Four Temperaments."  It was a rare opportunity to share music-making on the highest level, with an extraordinary group of musicians and their inspired leader.        

My favorite forms of chamber music are with dancers and motion pictures. Shortly before I joined the piano faculty of the University of British Columbia I was invited to become Music Director of the Mark Morris Dance Group -- a great honor which I hated to turn down. Morris is, of course, one of the world's greatest choreographers, and his troupe consists of incredible artists. This is one of them, Maile Okamura, sharing airs and champagne with me at a reception given for us by the Governer of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (during the Sydney Festival). We all enjoyed a warm and wondrous winter there in January 2003.

Here is a photo of my first masterclass at the National Taiwan National University in Taipei 2002. I had just stepped off the plane after nearly 22 hours of travel, and was brought directly to this small hall for 3 hours of lessons. Keeping one's cool is not always easy when travelling! Anyway, here I recalled asking the translator to remind the student that she is playing Bach on the piano -- not the harpsichord or organ.

Conductor Kirk Muspratt is a puckish and imaginative conductor, and we had great fun performing a Mozart Concerto with the New Philharmonic Orchestra of Illinois, in Autumn 2004.

I have spent a lot of time in Japan throughout my life, and consider it a second home of sorts. Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe and Nara are all well-known to me. I have also had the good fortune to visit lesser-known destinations such as Miyazaki, Arima (a beautiful onsen town) and Himeji, site of the imposing castle.

In my New York days, I began to study the Japanese language instensively at the Japan Society -- arigato gozaimashita, Yoshiko Watanabe-sensei! -- and now am able to do much of my Japanese piano teaching in the native language.

The deeply spiritual site behind me here is probably my very favorite place in all of Japan, the famous Kiyomizu Temple of Kyoto. A highlight of my year is an annual visit in Spring (Cherry Blossom season) , Fall (Autumn colors) or at New Year's, when it is time to make prayers and wishes for the future, and to reflect upon the past.

A Japanese temple of another sort is Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, where the Hansin Tigers baseball team of Osaka plays their home games. I am an avid Tiger fan, or "Torakichi." In this admittedly ridiculous photo I am making the "peace" sign typically offered by starstruck Japanese teenage girls for the camera. My companion is a much-beloved piano teacher from Takatsuki, Osaka, who has yielded to the Japanese temptation to let it all hang out at the ball game.

In the summer of 2002 I made my first visit to Taiwan, with fellow NYU faculty member and cellist Marion Feldman. We played a number of solo and duo concerts and gave lessons and master classes. We also ate some unforgettable food and shared an endless supply of bad jokes. Here we are in front of Taipei's main concert hall before a rehearsal, in a typically boisterous mood.

In the summer of 2001 I spent an afternoon with Kay Friml, the fourth and last wife of the legendary operetta composer Rudolf Friml, at her elegant home in the Hollywood Hills (purchased in the 1930s from Ginger Rogers). She was then a spunky Chinese-American women in her 90s who tore around Los Angeles in a sportscar. Mrs. Friml passed away in 2007.

On that unforgettable day I played several of Mr. Friml's compositions for her on his Steinway, shortly before recording them for Koch International. When the CD was released it received some terrific notices, and I am very glad that Mrs. Friml lived long enough to see the growing interest in her husband's long-neglected keyboard music. Very shortly a new biography of Rudolf Friml by musicologist William Everett will be published, by Indiana University Press.

I played some 20 different, and mostly obscure, piano concertos with the unforgettable Jens Nygaard and his Jupiter Symphony in New York City. Jens was a frenzied, irascible and altogether memorable figure on the New York music scene for some three decades; he sadly left us in 2001, not long after this picture was taken. At the time we were rehearsing the Polish Fantasy of Ignaz Jan Paderewski -- exactly the kind of Romantic and heart-all-out kind of music that Jens loved best.

I was born in the Chinese Year of the Pig, and for unexplainable reasons have loved pigs since childhood. To me, they are wholly adorable, cute and very bright, besides. My brother Matthew and I spent many happy hours drawing cartoons of pigs and other assorted animals, and I continue to sketch pigs to this day-- as caricatures, on cocktail napkins, in my diary, and the like. It is a particularly useful skill when teaching children, who respond to cartoons instinctively.

During a recent concert tour of the Midwest, I asked an Iowa sponsor if I could visit a Pig Farm. She looked aghast at first, then let on that her brother in fact was a pig farmer -- but added, "It's just that none of our ahtists ain't nevuh ASKED to go see 'em afore!" She graciously took me to see her brother's farm, and it took three washings to get the odor out of my clothes.

This dressed-up pig is me, recalling the feeling of just finishing off a difficult piece on one of my piano recitals. Note the piano endorsement.

My last and favorite address in New York City was at 3010 Grand Concourse, The Bronx. The Grand Concourse is a stately and historic avenue which runs the north-south length of the borough, lined with magnificent 1930s art deco apartment houses now somewhat in need of rehab, yet still exuding the grace and optimism of an older American era.

Here I stand near the intersection of the Grand Concourse and Bedford Park Boulevard, in typical New York winter weather 2001 -- slushy, cold, Rhapsody in Bus and Gray. To live in the Bronx is to know the soul of New York City, its dark and hearty underbelly. A proper grounding for the performance of Gershwin, Bernstein, Copland and the like.