Piano prodigy Tony Lu is returning to Port Townsend to play at Trinity United Methodist Church a second time.

Lu, a concert pianist who served as church member Christine Schoper‘s piano teacher, traveled to Washington state from Vermont, where he lives and works, to perform at the church’s concert last April.

Lu will again perform at Trinity United Methodist Church, this time at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 27, for one set with no intermission.

Hopscotching between the East and West coasts ranks among the shorter trips taken by the 26-year-old Lu, who was born in Wuhan, China, and  moved to the United States when he was 16 years old. He earned a high school degree in St. Louis, Missouri, before trekking to Bend, Oregon, from 2021 to 2022, and to Petersburg, Alaska, in February of 2024.

Schoper has attended Lu’s piano camps in Bennington, Vermont, where he earned his bachelors’ degrees in music, math and history simultaneously, after he began teaching piano to younger students during his own senior year of high school.

“I’ve taught adults at all sorts of different skill levels,” Lu said.

Lu notched all these achievements while also adjusting to having been born blind, which meant the only way he could learn piano was to listen to songs and literally “play by ear.”

On Feb. 27, Lu plans to perform a selection of original piano transcriptions of works by notable composers including Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, Schumann, Faure and Brahms, introducing each piece with a brief historical background.

“Last year, I appeared on the church’s concert schedule relatively late, so I was a little bit worried about the potential turnout,” Lu said. “I shouldn’t have been, because the Port Townsend community can really be counted on to attend events like this.”

Lu deemed last April’s turnout to be “amazing, especially given the smaller population of their community as a whole. At least 100 folks showed up. People in your neck of the woods really care about live music.”

Lu acknowledged that classical music “might not be the easiest music to understand,” but he’s asking his prospective listeners to lean into contemplating the pieces he’ll be playing, both during the concert and afterward.

“I think they might be surprised by the breadth of stylistic differences within the genre over the years,” said Lu, who arranged those pieces for the piano, even though they weren’t originally written for it.

Lu admitted that he not only enjoys imparting a deeper understanding of music to others, but “teaching is a huge part of what I do” in general, since he teaches not only music history and theory, as well as musicianship, but also mathematics and Chinese language.

Lu has performed at venues such as the Park-McCullough Historic House, Bennington Center for the Arts, Third Street Music School and Lincoln Center in New York City.

What to know

Trinity United Methodist Church, 609 Taylor St., across from the Uptown Community Center. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for the 7 p.m. Feb. 27 performance. Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $15 per person.