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The Sri Lankan music director, harpsichordist and fortepianist, Preethi de Silva, received her early musical training in Sri Lanka; she later studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin, earning diplomas in performance and teaching, and at Yale University, where she earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree. She also participated in workshops by harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and fortepianist Malcolm Bilson. She is the winner of numerous awards and fellowships, including several from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), The JDR 3rd Fund, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship, and the prestigious Erwin Bodky Award for early music performance.
Preethi de Silva is founder and music director of Con Gioia and has performed extensively on the harpsichord and fortepiano as soloist and chamber musician in the USA, the UK, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka. London’s Daily Telegraph praised her as “a musician of great accomplishment and imagination.”
Her publications include music for harpsichord and oboe. As well, she has composed works for solo harpsichord and string quartet. Her book, Fortepiano Writings of Streicher, Dieudonné, and the Schiedmayers, on early 19th–century German manuals and a previously unpublished workshop notebook on fortepianos, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press and in 2008 was awarded The Adèle Mellen Prize “for its distinguished contribution to scholarship.” She is the lead harpsichordist in Con Gioia’s compact disc of J.S. Bach's concertos for harpsichord.
In 2011, First Hand Records (UK) released Harmonic Labyrinth, which includes her recordings of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Folies d’Espagne and her own compositions for harpsichord. In recent years she has presented lecture-recitals and master-classes in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Germany and performed on BBC-3 and the Handel House Museum in London. She also presented recitals in Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig at the invitation of the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Germany and the University of the Arts, Berlin; and in commemoration of the 300th anniversary C.P.E. Bach's she performed recitals of his works in Germany and at the Zürich Festival.
Preethi de Silva's widely acclaimed recordings on five compact discs of C.P.E. Bach's Six Collections of Keyboard Sonatas, Free Fantasias, and Rondos for Connoisseurs and Amateurs were released in 2013-2014 by Centaur Records. In 2006 she received an Exceptional Achievement Award from the Sri Lanka Foundation, Los Angeles. Preethi de Silva’s recordings of keyboard works by C.P.E. Bach, Johann Gottfried Müthel, and W.A. Mozart have garnered extraordinary international critical acclaim. The journal Early Music (Oxford) recognized her for her “profound understanding of [C.P.E.] Bach’s idiosyncratic language.”
Preethi de Silva is emerita professor of music of Scripps College, Claremont, and adjunct professor of fortepiano at Claremont Graduate University. |
