Biography

Lin Kai (Sunny) Zhang’s passion for music can be heard around the world.

Ever since he began playing piano at the age of three, Sunny Lin Kai Zhang has performed in some of the foremost venues in the world, including New York Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Beijing Concert Hall, Vancouver Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Chan Centre, Van Cliburn Concert Hall, and Orpheum Theatre. He has performed numerous concertos with the Rimsky-Korsakov String Quartet in Canada and Chopin’s Second and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concertos with the Grosseto Symphony Orchestra in Italy. He performed Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra at the Chan Centre in 2021 and Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra in 2023. He will be performing the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto with the Vancouver Metropolitan Opera in February 2024, having recently made his Carnegie Hall Stern Auditorium debut in 2023.

Sunny has participated in many competitions: He won First Prizes at the Seattle International Piano Competition, the Carmel Clavier International Piano Competition in solo and concerto categories, the Orbetello International Piano Competition for Young Artists, and the Pacific International Piano Competition. He won top prizes at Steinway, Fou Ts’ong, San Jose, Sviatoslav Richter, Lancaster, and Enkor International Piano Competition, among many others. In Canada, he won second prize in the Canadian Music Competition, 1st prize at Provincial Arts BC, received RCM’s Gold Medal for the highest grade in the LRCM certificate and became a Steinway Young Artist at the age of 16.

Frequently participating in International Masterclasses around the world, Sunny has attended festivals in Philadelphia, New York, Nancy, Grosseto, Weimar, and Cleveland, working with renowned professors such as Gary Graffman, Dang Thai Song, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Stanislav Ioudenitch, Lydia Artymiw, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Robert Levin, Rena Shereshevskaya, Jon Nakamatsu, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Susan Starr, Eleanor Sokoloff, Antonio Pompa-Baldi, Alexander Braginsky, etc.

Sunny’s main teachers have included long-time mentor Eugene Skovorodnikov and renowned professor Matti Raekallio. He is currently a sophomore at the Juilliard School of Music, studying with Hung-Kuan Chen.