College of Liberal Arts

University of Minnesota,

Twin Cities Campus

Noriko Kawai

Visiting Associate Professor of Collaborative Piano

• 238 Ferguson Hall
• 612/624-6016
• E-mail: kawai002@umn.edu

Noriko Kawai studied with Phyllis Sellick and Yonty Solomon at the Royal College of Music in London and with Rodolfo Caporali at the Academia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Before her move to the United States in 2007, she served as professor of piano at the Royal College of Music in London. She has given numerous recitals and broadcasts throughout the world and is well known for the extraordinary range of her repertoire, from Renaissance composers to new music, and innovative programs juxtaposing standard and contemporary works.

In recent seasons Kawai has appeared at festivals in Aldeburgh, Bath, Huddersfield, Macerata, Paris, Strasbourg, Brussels, Berlin, Valencia, Oslo, Bludenz, Alicante, Rome, and Venice. She has given concerts with the Leopold String Trio, the Arditti Quartet, and the Quatuor Diotima and duo recitals with violinist Irvine Arditti and cellist Rohan de Saram.

For the NMC label Kawai has recorded works by Gerald Barry and more recently James Dillon’s The Book of Elements Volumes I-V. The latter received unanimous critical acclaim including Editor’s Choice in Gramophone. Her earlier Skryabin recital CD from Live Notes, Japan, was also hailed as a major artistic achievement: “…rivalling the greats of the so-called Golden Age…one of the great Skryabin recitals on disc.”

A new CD of chamber music by James Dillon, released by NMC in 2008, features Noriko Kawai in duo partnerships with Irvine Arditti and Hiroaki Takenouchi and with the Arditti String Quartet. Traumwerk Book 3 (violin and piano), black/nebulae (two pianos), and the soadie waste for piano quintet are all first recordings. Andrew Clements writes in his 5-star review in The Guardian: "All generate indelible musical images that are unlike those of any other composer working today. Dillon's instrumental writing takes no prisoners, but the playing of Kawai and the Ardittis in all these works is remarkable too; no composer could hope for better."

Recent concerto engagements include the first performances of Dillon’s Andromeda, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov, in London (BBC Proms 06 Royal Albert Hall) and Glasgow, and Lachenmann’s Ausklang in ‘Transcendent – the Music of Helmut Lachenmann’ presented by the Royal College of Music and the London Sinfonietta. Kawai also gave the French première of Andromeda, with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège/Pascal Rophé, at the festival ‘Musica’ in Strasbourg. In Fall 2009 she will appear as a soloist in the Piano Concerto Alternative World–Versions by Saed Haddad, with the Lativian National Symphony Orchestra/Zsolt Nagy at the Arena Festival in Riga, Lativia. Other forthcoming engagements include a solo recital at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival performing works by Emmanuel Nunes, North American Premiere performance of Traumwerk Book 3 for Violin and Piano by James Dillon with Irvine Arditti at the University of Minnesota's Ted Mann Concert Hall, Minnepolis, the first complete performance of Etudes Mysterieuses by Haddad at the French Academy of the Villa Medici Rome followed by the premiere recording of the same work for the Wergo label.

August 2009