The concerts of the Artist Residency Series are the culmination of the participation of tomorrow’s music stars- young and brilliant pianists who come to the festival to work with the artist faculty of Porto Pianofest and prepare for tours, recordings, important concerts, and to make their art known to the world.

Pianists are chosen, from all continents, to perform in a solo recital and share their unique musical ideas with our welcoming audience in Porto.

Deemed as "With Poetic Soul, radiating love, warmth, strong and subtle emotion. The true artist of Keyboard," Stanley Wong is a versatile and maverick musician based in Hong Kong who has made a career championing new music as well as a bold interpreter of challenging works from the Baroque to Romantic era.

————

Program Note from the Artist:

This program represents a profound dialogue across two centuries, navigating the listener through the intricate labyrinths of memory and grief toward a state of transcendent solace.

The journey begins with Polina Nazaykinskaya’s Ricercare Égaré (The Lost Search), a soul-wandering tone poem of haunting, displaced beauty. Its translucent Russian melancholy and crystalline textures serve as a poignant prelude to Franz Schubert’s monumental late masterpiece, the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959. While sharing the same spirit of seeking light within melancholy, this sonata, composed in the final year of his life amidst the shadows of illness, navigates the entire panorama of human experience—moving from the noble grandeur of its opening Allegro to the harrowing, modern panic of the Andantino storm, and finally arriving at a state of luminous nostalgia. Through Schubert’s ingenious cyclic thematic returns, the final Rondo provides the ultimate spiritual resolution that Nazaykinskaya’s straying melody seeks.

Together, this program creates a complete journey from being lost to finding reassurance— reminding us that within the wandering soul’s vulnerability, there is always optimism and life-affirming resilience.