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MOMO KODAMA, Piano

Born in Japan, Momo Kodama has lived in Europe from an early age. At 13 years old she entered the class of Germaine Mounier at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique, Paris, where she received her first prizes in piano and chamber music before going on to study further with such eminent pianists as Murray Perahia, Andras Schiff and Tatiana Nikolaeva. Ms Kodama has been awarded numerous prizes in Japan and in Europe, notably the Munich Competition in 1991 of which she was the youngest-ever winner and which brought her to the attention of the international music world.

She has already established an extraordinary career in Japan, performing regularly with the foremost Japanese orchestras (NHK, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, New Japan Philharmonic) under conductors such as Charles Dutoit, Eliahu Inbal, Valery Gergiev and Seiji Ozawa, who confirmed her as a ‘remarkable talent.’

Since her US debut in 1991 with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and Kent Nagano, she has been invited - and re-invited – by a large number of European and American orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Berlin Radio Symphony, Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, RAI Orchestra, Turin, Berlin Radio Symphony, Deutsche Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre de la Fondation Gulbenkian, l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg etc. She has also worked with the world’s most prestigious conductors such as Rudolf Barshai, Gary Bertini, Gunther Herbig, Lawrence Forster, Kent Nagano Zdenec Macal and Sir Roger Norrington.

Momo Kodama is equally in demand as a recitalist and chamber musician. She is invited to the most prestigious halls and festivals in Europe and the United States – the Wigmore Hall, Tonhalle Zurich, the Marlboro, Verbier, Lucerne, Davos and Berlin festivals, La Roque d’Anthéron (where her 2005 Chopin recital brought great acclaim), the Tivoli Festival (Copenhagen), Enesco Festival (Bucarest) and Schleswig Holstein. As well as regularly partnering violinist Yuzuko Horigome, with whom she performed Mozart’s complete violin sonatas in Japan and Europe during the 2004-2005 season, she has memorably performed with Steven Isserlis (on an Asian tour in 2004 and at the Ivry Gitlis Festival, Cassis) and, following the success of their first Mozart recitals in 2005, has begun an exciting collaboration with Dmitri Makhtin. Ms Kodama has participated in the 2005 and 2006 Folles Journées festivals in Nantes, Lisbon and Tokyo where the subtlety and insight of her playing in Clementi and Beethoven as in Bach and Mozart, won over the public.

A large part of her repertoire is consecrated to music of modern times – she performed the music of Arvö Part at the Settembre Musica-Torino festival 2004, Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony (which she studied with Yvonne Loriod), Les Oiseaux Exotiques, les Visions de l’Amen with her sister Mari and les Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus which she performed to great success in Tokyo during the 2002 Messiaen Year. Ms Kodama is also the dedicatee of Lichtstudie 3 by Jorg Widmann, which she premièred at the Lucerne Festival and Echo by Ichiro Nodaira, dedicated to the Momo/Mari duo and performed in Berkeley and Berlin. In August 2006, at the request of Madame Loriod, she premiered Messiaen’s Fantaisie pour violin et piano (written in 1933 but never performed in public) with Isabelle Faust at La Roque d’Anthéron for an evening dedicated to Messiaen.

She also recently premièred Lotus under the moonlight, the piano concerto written for her by the eminent Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, with the NDR Symphony Orchestra and Jun Maerkl, before taking it to Japan to perform and record with Seiji Ozawa and the Mito Chamber Orchestra. It is with the same partners that she will perform the work during their European tour in Spring 2008.

After two remarkable debut recordings - the first a recital by Debussy in 2002 and the second a recital of Chopin – in 2005 Momo Kodama recorded the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus by Olivier Messiaen, which met with immediate success both in Japan and in Europe.