From Rising Stars to Signature Series: Silvie and Bryan Cheng return to their musical roots at Chamberfest

Silvie and Bryan Cheng have come full circle at Chamberfest. The talented sister and brother started as the winners of the very first Rising Stars showcase. Today they are rocking the festival’s premier Signature Series in the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre stage on Aug 7 .

The siblings have been playing together professionally for years. But it started in the family home in Ottawa. These days their music has taken them around the world and back home again.

Silvie started first. At five, she was practicing the piano. It didn’t matter that their parents didn’t play music, Bryan was inspired by his older sister and took up an instrument of his own, the cello, at three and a half years old.

The siblings attended Chamberfest in its early days, waiting for hours in the heat and meeting like-minded music fans from all over.

“We would watch our heroes like the Gryphon Trio or the Beaux Arts Trio give concerts and it was an amazing gift to the community,” Silvie said. “That was really our inspiration for seeing what a career in music could be like.

“And then as you can imagine, to be on the same stage that you saw your heroes was the first foray into really feeling what that was like.” 

Bryan studied at the SuzukiMusic school and Silvie studied with Nicole Presentey. Presentey is a renowned pianist and music teacher in the Ottawa region. She’s also the creator of Chamberfest’s Rising Stars Showcase, an annual competition to highlight young musicians in the community.

The Cheng siblings performed in the very first edition of Rising Stars in 2007, when Bryan was nine and Silvie was 15. 

“It’s such an amazing initiative for the festival to do that, because as you can imagine, we grew up every summer going to Chamberfest,” said Silvie. 

Chamberfest has continued to be an integral part of the their careers. 

“It really feels like a musical family at this point, because we’ve been playing almost every year since 2007 when we first made our debut,” Bryan said. 

During the pandemic, Chamberfest supported the duo’s two-part project of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas for cello and piano titled Ludwig & Beyond, complete with three commissioned works. Chamberfest was one of the first presenters to showcase their project. 

“They’ve been there every step of the way throughout our careers and now we’re always happy to perform for our hometown audiences,” said Bryan.

This year marks their first time performing in the Signature Series, which is dedicated to performances from world-class musicians. The Chengs described the full-circle feeling of this moment in their careers. 

“There’s an extra special feeling of truly coming home and playing for audiences that have watched us grow up. There were many people who were at that first Rising Stars Showcase and continue to come to all the concerts,” Silvie said. 

The duo has been busy in the many years between their first Rising Stars performance. Silvie obtained a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music, and Bryan studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin. 

Silvie now teaches in New York, at the Manhattan school and privately. She’s been a music educator for 10 years, and said she believes in cultivating a passion for music in her students.

“I’m really really passionate about inspiring and sharing the joy of music making with the next generation. And I think if we approach anything in life with that joy, it will affect your life in so many ways beyond the actual activity.” 

She explained that music shouldn’t be an obligation or a chore, but rather something that the students deeply enjoy. This is a similar ethos to that of Presentey, Silvie’s own teacher. 

“With her I learned so much about just respecting each composer’s ultimate intention, and we spent so much time looking at scores together, especially Mozart. I think with her, I really truly fell in love with the music of Mozart, and also with the way of making the piano sing,” Silvie said.  

Bryan also speaks highly of his teachers, especially Jens Peter Maintz, whom he studied with during his university years in Berlin. 

“He really was a wonderful figure in my life for many years, and taught me so much of what I know today.”

Another one of his inspirations is the Hungarian pianist András Schiff, whom Bryan met at the Kronberg Academy. 

Today, Bryan is based in Berlin. They meet every two months for intense periods of touring around the world, and they play about half of their concerts as a duo. Bryan and Silvie extensively practice their repertoire individually before coming together to rehearse. 

Despite their busy schedule as soloists with various orchestras, chamber music ensembles, and other festivals, the pair still find time for each other.

“We manage to make the rehearsals work. I don’t really know how, exactly,” Bryan said with a laugh.

“When we’re together, we’re actually less rehearsing ensemble things and we’re more just experimenting with ideas and feelings and the more intangible elements,” Silvie said. 

They both attribute their musical connection to a shared intuition — they both think about music the same way. 

“It’s fascinating how we still continue to grow in parallel paths despite the fact that our daily lives are so different. I can only attribute it to the fact that we both feel music quite similarly,” Bryan said.

“It’s one of the most gratifying experiences ever to be able to not only to share a life on and off the stage with someone you know so well, but also to be able to make music and to live these very special moments which happen without really any explanation.”

Fuelled by their passion for music and the power it has to bring people together, the Cheng siblings are unstoppable. This summer, they will continue touring Canada, the United States and Europe. 

“Every time we get to share music with new audiences in new places such as India and South Africa and Romania and Switzerland, all of these places in the past few months, it’s very refreshing and exciting to hear these reactions from audiences who have perhaps never heard some of the pieces we are playing for them,” Bryan said. 

The duo is constantly inspired and arranging new music. They’ve released four albums to date, the newest of which is something different. Previously, their repertoire cosysted of the standard classical canon, but their newest album, Portraits, has a heavy folk influence and is written by composers of Asian heritage.

This album contains repertoire written specifically for the duo. The siblings wanted to explore their Chinese heritage through folk songs, written for folk instruments and then transcribed to cello and piano. 

Silvie described the effect that sharing this special music has on the audience. 

“It’s been wonderful to see even people who are not of our heritage can have a profound connection to this music. That’s really been the joy, to share more and more of our culture,” she said. 

“Our world is getting smaller and smaller, and the farther you go, the more you start to meet people who are just like you.”

The pair is thrilled to bring a mix of the novel and the familiar to the stage this year. 

“Our goal is to have a combination of discovery and something that people can hum on the way home and that they can fall in love with for the first time,” Bryan said. 

Their Chamberfest programme includes Georgian, Norwegian and Indian folk music. The evening will also include an original composition from Ottawa-based composer and University of Ottawa Professor Dinuk Wijeratne specifically for the Chengs titled “Portrait of an Imaginary Sibling.”

The duo will be joined in the night by James Campbell, clarinetist and artistic director of Festival of the Sound. 

Chamberfest is at the heart of the Cheng2 Duo’s musical story, and there’s no one else that they’d rather share it with than each other and their hometown.

“When you put musicians in a room full of people who are listening intently and want to be moved, there’s no way you can’t create something special, and to be able to share that with someone who knows you so well, who you trust, there’s no better feeling,” said Bryan.

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