Press: July 2008 Archives

Call her Naomi: Gilmore Young Artist Kudo makes some changes

By
Naomi.Kudo
 on July 2, 2008 2:35 AM | 
Call her Naomi: Gilmore Young Artist Kudo makes some changes
Kalamazoo Gazette
April 13th, 2008
Elizabeth Clark

 

 

   Savvy followers of the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival may think they spy a mistake when they see the name of pianist Naomi Kudo.


   Kudo, one of two 2008 Gilmore Young Artist award recipients (the other is Adam Golka), changed her professional name from Rachel Kudo -- or Rachel Naomi Kudo, which she also has used -- to Naomi Kudo this winter.


   "My parents had expressed that they would like me to maybe use my middle name because that's also my Japanese name," Kudo said by phone from her New York City home. "In the past, I've usually used both names, which is confusing because some people assume because of my ethnicity that I'm half-Caucasian or an Asian-Jewish pianist (she's actually of Korean-Japanese descent) because both of my names are Jewish. They thought it would be easier if I chose just one."


   She expects to answer to both for quite some time.


   "Everybody still calls me Rachel," she said. "I think it's always been my parents who called me Naomi. I'm really happy with anything as long as I can keep doing what I do and keep playing more music."


Recent excitement
   Most recently, Kudo, who attends the Juilliard School in New York City, performed in Vienna, Austria, as part of an exchange program between Juilliard, the National Conservatory of Paris and the University of Vienna for the Performing Arts.

   "There were five musicians each representing the three schools," Kudo said. "They wanted us to get to know each other and to play chamber music together, and we performed a concert in Vienna."
  
   Exploring the city that was such a destination location for baroque bigwigs was "really moving," the young artist said.

 

   "It was such a great experience," she said. "We got to really look around the city, and we also visited a lot of important musical sites: Beethoven's old house, Mozart's old house, the cemetery where Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and all these people were buried."

   Kudo said it was interesting to see the differences between European and American students.


   "It was really cool that, even though some of the other students didn't speak English very well when we started rehearsal, we got to communicate through our music," she said. "I think that was a common experience for all of us."


   Kudo also describes her Carnegie Hall chamber-music appearance in December 2007 as a career highlight. She appeared with a violinist from Juilliard.


   "We worked on Brahms violin sonatas with Emanuel Ax and David Zinman and also a clarinetist, Richard Stoltzman," she said. "That was like one of the most intense and amazing weeks, because every day we were coaching and playing and training and asking Mr. Ax and Mr. Zinman questions. It was also very touching because these busy and important people were really interested in helping us young artists out. I thought that was such an incredible thing."


Astonishing record

   Kudo's own career certainly qualifies as incredible. The pianist won the 2007 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, was the sole American finalist at the 2005 15th International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, earned second prize at the seventh National Chopin Competition (2005) in the U.S., is a 2004 Davidson Fellow Laureate and four-time scholarship recipient from the Chopin Foundation of the United States.

   She said she's thrilled at the possibility of rubbing shoulders with more stars during her Gilmore visit.
 
   "I was thinking of asking (festival Executive Director Dan Gustin) if I could meet Mitsuko Uchida," Kudo said. "She's one of my idols. That would be one thing that would be amazing. She and I are playing a recital on the same day about two hours apart. I was really hoping to make her recital."
 

   Kudo's schedule at the Gilmore includes a slot at the opening dinner on April 25, an Albion College appearance April 26, a Stetson Chapel recital April 28, a Calvin College performance April 29, a Battle Creek performance May 4 and a collaboration with the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra in Benton Harbor on May 11.

  
   Her solo recital performances will feature J.S. Bach's Overture in the French Style in B Minor, BWV 831; Carl Vine's Sonata No. 1; Ravel's "Sonatine"; and Schumann's "Carnaval, Op. 9." The symphonic collaboration in Benton Harbor will feature Mozart's Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467; and Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade."


   For her opening dinner set, she said she plans to play short works and transcriptions that are "popular and easy to enjoy," including "The Flight of the Bumblebee."

Gilmore Rising Star executes classics with brilliance, clarity

By
Naomi.Kudo
 on July 2, 2008 2:24 AM | 
Gilmore Rising Star executes classics with brilliance, clarity

Kalamazoo Gazette
September 10th, 2007
C.J. Gianakaris


  
An arm of the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival is its Rising Stars Recital Series, whereby six to eight top-flight younger pianists offer solo programs each year, spread across the Gilmore's music season. On Sunday evening, the first of four performances in the 2007-08 series that will be held once a month through December, was launched in impressive fashion at the Wellspring Theater. Spotlighted was American-born Naomi Kudo in a demanding and warmly received program displaying her amazing technique and superior interpretative ability. Kudo also happens to be a 2008 Gilmore Young Artist and will perform again at next spring's Gilmore Festival.


   With her parents in the audience, Kudo offered a splendid display of piano artistry. No matter what volume, the evenness of notes in passages was uncanny, with melody always crystal clear. Joined with superlative technical prowess was an intelligent caressing of melodic line in which every note played had significance. An audience favorite was Kudo's crystalline playing of Mozart's Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332. Always true with Mozart's piano music is the need for absolute clarity, and Kudo passed with flying colors. She played its three movements with considered, subdued restraint, fast and forte passages carefully meted out as called for. Cleanly articulated lines were the norm.


   Kudo next turned to Chopin's Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 39. Its opening demanded assertive forte octave runs alternating with gossamer sounds created through tinkling notes in the upper treble. Virtuosity dominated in highly dramatic bars, though Kudo could still exhibit sensitivity without eviscerating the music's substance.


   For many the apex of the recital was Kudo's amazing rendition of Chopin's ``Andante Spianato'' and``Grand Polonaise Brilliante'' in E-flat Major, Op.22. Kudo has won numerous Chopin competitions. Now we know why. Every feature of this work was expressed and projected with incredible clarity and nuance. The profusion of chromatic runs and passages were pearly smooth, each note sounding, no matter what tempo.


   She made sense of every passage, regardless of how complex. Hers was, simply, a brilliant performance.


   Carl Vine's 1990 work, Piano Sonata No. 1, offered interesting rhythmic effects. Almost continuous use of sustaining pedal created much of the work's overall aura, though dissonance dominated. The pervasive clatter-bang of the piece shortened audience patience. Kudo prevailed to make some musical sense from the exciting but loud score.


   Closing was Kudo's able playing of Liszt's ``Reminiscences de Don Juan (Mozart), S. 418.'' Obviously Liszt's prime objective was to spotlight the pianist (him), and not the music. Kudo followed Liszt's instructions in a splurge of bombastic runs and trills, picking clean Mozart's bones. Many might have preferred Mozart's music straight.



The Reno Philharmonic scores with the profound and the beautiful and Naomi Kudo

By
Naomi.Kudo
 on July 2, 2008 2:15 AM | 
The Reno Philharmonic scores with the profound and the beautiful and 
Naomi Kudo

Music Reviews
January 15th, 2007
Jack Neal



   Building a program from a semblance of the raucousness of Tin Pan Alley, to the affectingly profound, with lush romanticism sandwiched in between, provides nothing less than a concert recipe for success. It's also a recipe that allows conductor Barry Jekowsky to score once again with accessible and exciting programming, triumphantly performed.

   William Grant Still's "Animato" from his Afro-American Symphony, Edvard Grieg's ultra romantic Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in A minor, and Dmitri Shostakovich's massive and profound Symphony No. 10 in E minor presents an enormous programmatic challenge. It's a challenge impressively managed by the Reno Philharmonic and its conductor Barry Jekowsky.

   Adding to this achievement is 19 year old American pianist Naomi Kudo, who is making her Reno debut with these series of concerts. Before a large and appreciative Sunday afternoon (1/14/07) audience of instant fans at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts, this young pianist proves she is a winner in the hard-knock existence of the concert world.

   The Grieg piano concerto is so popular it's rarely heard, which makes it all the more welcome. Kudo provides a technically assured performance with an abundance of lyricism that caresses the concerto's rhapsodic nature from beginning to end. The bravura of the first and last movements, give way to the haunting middle movement that is one of the loveliest slow movements in all of the piano concerto repertory. Kudo is a subtle artist whose impeccable facility never overshadows her gifts for a perfectly turned phrase mixed with elements of surprise.

   We've heard the critical complaint that Grieg could not develop a tune, only compose one. In his A minor concerto he has composed one memorable tune after another. What's not to like and love? Nothing seemed problematic for Sunday's audience. Kudo and the concerto deserved and received a thunderous ovation.

   Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 is the composer's symphonic masterpiece. Few other symphonies have such a shrewd, keen sense of balance from movement to movement. Taken alone, any of its four movements are admirable, but incomplete. Taken together, each plays off the others so well that incompleteness gives way to a completeness of vision that bridges the delicate balance between passion and poise that makes for great writing and the possibilities of a compelling interpretation.

   Jekowsky leads an incisive performance with cool precision and blistering subjectivity. The orchestra rises nicely to the occasion for a flawlessly paced presentation full of operatic lyricism and architectural insight. Jekowsky's is a powerful musical exploration of a work loaded with explorable utterances. How exciting to hear such a definitive performance here.

   How exciting, too, to hear William Grant Still's attractive "Animato" from his Afro-American Symphony. This bluesy, jazzy, thoroughly American work got the treatment from a bluesy, jazzy, thoroughly American orchestra and conductor who know how to get under the skin and into the groove of American music. It's the kind of letting one's hair down, that gives the Still a pulsating reading that turns it into the music that makes everyone dance.

Naomi Kudo, The Impact of Perfection

By
Naomi.Kudo
 on July 2, 2008 2:05 AM | 
Naomi Kudo, The Impact of Perfection


El Nuevo Herald (Miami, FL)
June 14th, 2006
Daniel Fernandez

   It's almost hard to believe - in spite of the incessant proliferation of excellent young pianists - that Naomi Kudo could have achieved, in only 19 years, a miracle of flawless technique and expressive versatility which she demonstrated in her recital Sunday afternoon in Gusman Concert Hall at the University of Miami.

   Kudo obtained the second prize in last year's National Chopin Competition - and one wonders how brilliant the first prize winner must have been - in any case, for her crystalline execution of the Beethoven Sonata Op.2 No.2 in A major, and her spectacular tour de force in the most difficult passages of the Barber Sonata, Op.26, played in the first half of the concert, one could appreciate that Kudo possesses a versatility that many don't accomplish without long years of experience.

   This was a natural talent, and we had no doubt that we were before one of those natural pianists, who, without discrediting hard work, possess special qualities that permit them to capture with sensibility and profundity the keys in the phrasing and the spirit of the distinct composers. Her Beethoven was well-balanced and clean, an exercise in classicism worthy of opening the night. On the other hand, the Barber would have filled the composer with pride. Not a single note was lost in the dazzling and almost impossible to play passages, the reason for which this extraordinary work of the piano literature of the twentieth century is almost outlawed in concert halls.

   The second part of the concert was dedicated to two works from the vast wealth of Chopin's output. The Andante Spinato and Grande Polonaise Brillante Op. 22, and the Third Sonata in B minor Op.58. The first, like its name indicates, opens calmly but introduces melodic phrases that the second part of the work develops in a more rhythmic context. This work shows the tendencies of Chopin, the nostalgic, the intense, an invitation to dance...



   The second work is one of grand architectural breadth: four movements with their corresponding changes of tempi and states of animation. In the masterful hands of miss Kudo, this exquisite structure came through. In the pompous and elegant "Allegro maestoso" and the vibrant "Scherzo", and in the "Largo" with all its perfumes of impossible memories, and the brilliant festive "Finale" with cascades of chords and passages that take your breath away. It was an extraordinary ending by an extraordinary pianist who promises to become a legend in this new century.




Let the Romanza Be a Romanza

By
Naomi.Kudo
 on July 2, 2008 1:45 AM |
Let the Romanza Be a Romanza

The Warsaw Voice
October 20th, 2005
Jan Popis



   The Concerto in E Minor op. 11, chosen more often by the finalists, is a very mature piece and this probably explains why it was chosen by 10 of the candidates. We will hear the Concerto in F Minor only twice. It is said that the Chopin Competition is won by those who end their performances with the more mature work: the bravura double scales in E Major; who, playing the Romanza-the slow movement, can say everything "from their hearts." But, this is not quite true, to recall 1980 and the Concerto in F Minor played by Dang Tai-Son.Depending on the tempo played, the Allegro maestoso, the first movement of the Concerto in E Minor, can be... a polonaise. That's how Jacek KORTUS played it, to express the nature of this Polish dance. Though this was his first performance with an orchestra, he managed to carry the huge burden of such a debut. He was calm and controlled practically everything. I thought to myself, why aren't such fantastically talented young artists in Poland given the chance to get used to playing with an orchestra? Where are the philharmonics and other orchestras for which a joint concert with young talent would be an embellishment of the season? As for the performance of the 17-year-old pianist from Poznań, the main thing is that he managed to maintain the majesty of the main part of the work, that the final krakowiak pulsated with a good rhythm, not too quick, though it lacked the effect of a finish with shine that is desirable here.


   Naomi KUDO, representing the United States and a year older than our candidate, played the same concerto in a typically "pianistic" way; the first movement at a slightly faster pace, which gave it more energy and pianistic flourish. KUDO plays with talent, and also... cheerfully. Listening to her is a great pleasure. In each successive stage she convinced us more and more that working with a marvelous teacher that we appreciate greatly here in Poland, Lee Kum-Sing from Vancouver, she will achieve a great deal as a Chopinist.


   The Concerto in E Minor played by the next finalist, Ka Lim Colleen LEE from China-Hong Kong, added little more to what we'd already heard. If we were to treat the interpretation of this piece in a more classical convention, then the artist from Hong Kong is fine with her reserved emotionality and more chamber-like virtuoso capacity.


   The second day of the final also began with the Concerto op. 11. Yuma OSAKI from Japan is a pianist who does well at competitions, winning major awards. She feels confident in performances with an orchestra and is able to carry out her plans with consistency. These, however, are not very sublime, when you think of the nuances of style in the Concerto in E Minor. Instead of a presentation of confident and effective competition playing, I would have preferred more in-depth listening to all that the 20-year-old Chopin, carried on a noble feeling of love, wrote in his scores.


   The performance of Korean Dong Hyek LIM was, to my mind, his best production at the competition, compared to previous stages. In the Concerto in F Minor op. 21, he played the mazurka finale spectacularly: with shine, "defining" the brillante style of the piece well. But that was only part of all that Chopin says here. Do these young artists, who play the piano so fantastically, know who Konstancja Gładkowska was?


   The final's second day closed with a performance by Shohei SEKIMOTO of Japan. His interpretation of the Concerto in E Minor went in the direction of pianistic effect and firm placement on the keyboard. The flushes of vigorous virtuosity obviously generate great emotions, but are they what we should expect of this composition by Chopin?


A Striking Contrast

By
Naomi.Kudo
 on July 2, 2008 1:32 AM | 
A Striking Contrast

The Warsaw Voice
October 18th, 2005
Jan Popis



   Mazurkas, a polonaise and a sonata. These include almost everything needed to provide a full picture of the skills of candidates for the Chopin Grand Prix 2005. How should one play a stylish mazurka? This is one of the challenges for everyone who wants to face the Chopin repertoire.


   When trying to discover the secrets of this mazurka style, the famous Aleksander Michałowski in the 19th century requested the elderly Duchess Marcelina Czartoryska, one of the most talented students of Chopin, to play a few mazurkas. After some balking and excusing her no longer complete piano skills, the duchess played Mazurka in D major op. 33 no. 3. Michałowski was greatly surprised to hear that the main theme was from the very beginning played heartily, without any shading. Only at the very end the last fragment sounded delicately and exquisitely, with a "caring" touch of the keyboard. When asked why she played the main theme this way, Duchess Czartoryska replied, "This is how Chopin taught me. He told me that in this mazurka, he wanted to render the contrast between 'an inn and a salon'."


   The times when the young Chopin listened to the sound of a village band at an inn are long gone. The salons are also a thing of the past, since mazurkas, and in turn Chopin's music, have entered big concert halls. How should one play Chopin's mazurkas?


   The recital of Hisako KAWAMURA turned out promising in terms of mazurkas. She played Mazurka in G Minor op. 24 no. 1 in a broad and singing phrase.


   Yusuke KIKUCHI played his program in a clearly less personal style. His mazurkas, with the one in D Major (op. 33) did not go beyond academic framework in their correctness.


   We saw more emotion and spontaneity in Mazurkas op. 59 as interpreted by Ben KIM. He was able not only to create a mood, but also maintain it--and its different shades--both in Andante Spianato and Funebre March.


   Szczepan KOŃCZAL, the first from the group of seven Polish pianists, presented his program very well, confirming his piano skills. His chamber style allows for a longer focus on the details of Chopin's notes that are most often blurred when bravado pianists play it.


   The nobility of the young talent of Jacek KORTUS is like a refreshing spring breeze. In Mazurkas op. 17, particularly in A Flat Major and A Minor, he captured the mood of the moment. This "something" that can be achieved only once and never again--at least in an identical way--and you can never come back to it. With his performance of Polonaise in A Flat Major op. 53 he demonstrated that his talent and obvious skills allow him to successfully play works of such scale as op. 53.


   The 18-year-old Naomi KUDO attracted attention with her performance of Sonata in B Minor op. 58. Her excellent piano preparation and talent were appreciated by the audience and awarded with an ovation. Kudo played the Mazurkas op. 33 with temperament directed at stressing the rhythm of the Mazovian dance.


   The style of Olga KOZLOVA, as much intriguing as controversial, will certainly add color to the list of personalities of the 15th Competition. To evaluate her as a Chopinesque performer is both very easy and very difficult.


   Of the first day of performances in the second round, it is worth noting the recital of Ka Ling Collen LEE, whose Polonaise-Fantasia demonstrated her ability to execute a form featuring such a variable scale of moods.
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