about
Since beginning piano studies at the age of 3, Becky Y. Lu has been invited to perform at such venues as Jordan Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Salle Pleyel, and the Bard Music Festival to critical acclaim from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has collaborated with regional American orchestras, appeared on National Public Radio, and participated in festivals across the U.S. and Europe, including Meadowmount, Kneisel Hall, Taos, Prades, and the International Musicians Seminar at Prussia Cove. As a scholar, she has given talks, lectures, and lecture-recitals at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Analysis, Trinity Church Wall Street, Oxford's Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, and the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on music analysis, music and politics, opera, Western music history, and piano and chamber music performance at the California Institute of Technology as well as at Cornell, Syracuse, Oxford, and Yale Universities. Becky received a Ph.D. in Musicology from Cornell, where her multidisciplinary research interests led to a dissertation that rethinks the historiography of musical modernism through theories of translation, nineteenth-century Russian literary culture, and the music of Benjamin Britten. She is the Contributing Editor for music at The Hudson Review, a magazine of literature and the arts founded in 1948 and published in New York City. Becky is currently a Doctoral Lecturer at the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she also serves as Interim Director of the Silberman Concert Series.
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Becky graduated magna cum laude from Yale College, where she double majored in Political Science and Music. She earned a Master of Music and an Artist Diploma in Piano Performance from the Yale School of Music as the recipient of the Luther Noss Award. She also holds an M.Phil. in Musicology from the University of Oxford, where she won the concerto competition and performed Brahms's first piano concerto with the Oxford University Philharmonia at the Sheldonian Theatre. She is grateful to her extraordinary teachers and mentors, who include Jonathan Cross, Peter Frankl, Michael Friedmann, Seymour Lipkin, Robert McDonald, William E. Odom, Joseph N. Straus, and James Webster.
Outside of music, Becky has worked on a winning U.S. Senate campaign and interned at the House of Representatives. Her nonmusical interests include gastronomy, globetrotting, politics, racquet sports, and rowing. She made her uncredited Hollywood debut as a pianist in Mao's Last Dancer (2009), a film by award-winning director Bruce Beresford.