"Part cartoon character, part virtuoso, musical whiz kid WANG JIE has spent the last decade nudging serious music and its concert audiences into spectacular frontiers. One day she spins a few notes into a large symphonic form, the next she conjures a malevolent musical rat onto the opera stage. Last season, you might have heard about her pioneering opera “It Rained on Shakopee,” based on her experience as a mentor at a Minnesota state prison. A few months later, Jie pioneered again, a one-of-a-kind “composer-in-residence” performance in Paris, sharing her entire creative process with an audience over a four-day whirlwind of composition, paving new paths for greater public engagement with classical music.

Many consider Ms. Wang’s stylistic versatility a rare trait among today's composers, but she comes by it naturally. There is a mile-long dossier on Jie’s outside-the-box incidents, beginning with a thrilling escape from a Chinese military-run kindergarten at the age of four. Today, that same refusal of constraint sparks the glorious madness of Jie’s music; the skill, theatricality and method that once facilitated her youthful escape are now the engines for her appetite to “Engage • Explore • Play”. Jie credits her mentors at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Manhattan School of Music for giving her the tools to make her artistic mischief. This season, Jie is busy finishing her comic opera “Rated R for Rat,” starting a new symphony on a commission from the Buffalo Philharmonic, and creating a new work for the Shanghai Quartet. For a complete profile and to listen to highlights of her work, please visit: www.wangjiemusic.com"
Born in Shanghai shortly after the Cultural Revolution, Wang Jie was raised during an era of breathtaking economic expansion. She was a piano prodigy by age five, and a scholarship from the Manhattan School of Music brought her to the U.S..