Myra Huang

Myra Huang has been active both as a pianist and as part of the music staff at the New York City Opera. She also maintains careers as a recitalist and as a chamber music player. Huang was born in New York to recent Korean immigrant parents. She grew up mostly in Oregon. Huang graduated from the Houston Grand Opera Studio and received a bachelor's degree in piano performance from the Juilliard School and a master's from the Manhattan School of Music. As a pianist, she has performed in recitals and chamber music concerts at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Metropolitan Museum, the Supreme Court, La Scala in Milan, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society Concerts, and the University of Chicago Presents series, to name a few. She has made recordings with tenor Nicholas Phan and others, and her 2011 album with Phan, Winter Words, landed on several season's best lists in New York and Boston, including that of The New York Times. Huang also accompanied mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera on Innocence / Experience, a recital of songs with texts by, among others, Garrison Keillor. Opera News praised her as "among the top accompanists of her generation." Huang has also pursued a career in the world of opera, serving on the staffs of the Washington National Opera and Opera Pacific. From 2006 until 2008, she was a staff member at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, where she worked with Lorin Maazel and Zubin Mehta. She has also worked with Plácido Domingo as staff pianist for the Operalia competition, held at various opera houses around the world. In 2012, Huang was named head of music staff at the New York City Opera. In that role, she oversees rehearsals and contributes to the casting of operas. She was a member of the NYCO music staff from 2004 to 2006, worked in that capacity as a freelancer after the position was eliminated, and was rehired as head in 2012 when it was restored. In the late 2010s, Huang added prestigious positions to her coaching resume: teaching at the Music Academy of the West, the Houston Grand Opera Studio, the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago, and as of the 2019-2020 seasons, the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. Huang's Carnegie Hall recital with Lawrence Brownlee at Carnegie Hall was selected by New York radio station WQXR as one of 2018’s best classical recitals of the year, and in 2019, the pair won the Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artist Award for 2019 from The Classical Recording Foundation. In 2017, she and Phan released the album Gods and Monsters. She rejoined Phan in 2020 for Clairières, an album devoted to the songs of Lili and Nadia Boulanger.
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