Jess Larsen is a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Piano Performance under the instruction of Gilles Vonsattel. Jess began playing piano at the age of 3 and composing at 5. In 2008, after Lang Lang discovered a video of her playing Chopin’s Etude Op. 25 No. 11, he invited Jess to become one of the first three scholars of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation. Under the auspices of the foundation where she was a scholar until 2014, Jess was granted the honors to perform at venues such as the Oprah Winfrey Show and Carnegie Hall, perform concerti with the Midwest Young Artists Symphony Orchestra at Millennium Park, Chicago, and attend the Oxford Philomusica Piano Festival and Summer Academy where she received master classes from Dame Fanny Waterman and Menahem Pressler. Jess competed at the Gina Bachauer Junior International Piano Competition in 2012 and the Van Cliburn Junior International Piano competition in 2015. Also in 2015, she recorded her album Boundless, featuring Chopin’s Etudes Op. 25 and Liszt’s Sonata No. 1 in B minor. 

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One of Jess’s favorite composers has always been Johann Sebastian Bach. By the time she was 12, she had recorded the complete first and second books of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. In 2021, to mark the 10 year anniversary of her first Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 album, she re-recorded the work in her latest release, Transformations. The title reflects not only the evolution of Jess’s approach to the works over the past 10 years, but also Bach’s revolutionization of the entire trajectory of keyboard performance through his establishment of the well-tempered tuning system, which made it possible for pieces to be played in any of the 24 keys for the first time in history. 

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An avid composer as well, Jess composed her first symphony at age 10, which was granted an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and debuted by the Newton Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Ronald Knudsen in 2011. She also won ASCAP Awards for her first piano concerto in 2012 and second piano concerto in 2016, and was awarded first place in the Massachusetts division of the MTNA Composition Competition for nine consecutive years from 2007-2015, the latter year during which she began a 3-year hiatus from music to focus on school and explore her other interests.

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In her first year as a transfer student at UMass Amherst (2021-2022), Jess gave a solo recital of Schubert's Sonata D 960 and Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata Op. 106, two monumental works sharing the key of B-flat. Following this recital was the world premiere of Jess' original Andante Espressivo (performed by Jess, Christopher Bolduc, Devin Cowan, and Katie Chuang), a work that served as a completion of Gustav Mahler's famous unfinished Piano Quartet in A minor (other possible completions of the quartet have been realized by various composers over the years, the most well-known version by the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke).

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Jess is indebted to her piano, composition, and other music teachers and professors who have provided and continue to provide her with invaluable instruction, advice, and support. She owes special thanks to Marty Boykan, Gilles Vonsattel, Erinn Knyt, Matthew Westgate, Lang Lang, Haewon Song, Arnie Cox, Aleksandr Korsantia, A. Ramon Rivera, and Sachiko Isihara, all of whom have played monumental roles in helping to shape who she is as a musician and person today.