Aki Takahashi - Aki Takahashi Plays Erik Satie 2 - Japan Blu-ray Audio

TV Standard: NTSC

Credits:

Takahashi Aki

Description:

The second instalment in Aki Takahashi's project to record the piano music of Erik Satie, gathering works written between 1913 and 1919. This latest recording, made in Italy with a magnificent Fazioli instrument brought into the venue, is reproduced here in high resolution on Blu-ray. The booklet carries a newly edited version of the programme notes by Kuniharu Akiyama, celebrated for his Satie scholarship. Born in Kamakura, she began piano lessons at the age of five with her mother, Eiko Takahashi. She studied at the high school and university attached to the Tokyo University of the Arts, completing her graduate studies there, and worked with Georg Vasarhelyi. She gave her first recital in 1970, and in 1972 travelled to Europe for the first time, giving recitals at the Berliner Festwochen and the Festival d'Automne a Paris among others. In 1973 her album The World of Aki Takahashi (Toshiba-EMI), containing twenty contemporary works from Japan and abroad, won the Excellence Prize at the 1973 Japan Arts Festival. From 1975 she presented a twelve-concert series, Erik Satie: The Complete Works, with the programme planner Kuniharu Akiyama, an event that triggered the "Satie rediscovery" in Japan. She edited the thirteen-volume Erik Satie: Complete Piano Works (Zen-On) and released the recorded Erik Satie: Complete Piano Music (Toshiba-EMI). In 1980 she visited the United States for the first time at the invitation of Morton Feldman, and in 1984 was a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts. She received the first Kenzo Nakajima Prize in 1983 and the first Kyoto Music Award (Practice Division) in 1986, and in 2003 was awarded the 21st Kenzo Nakajima Prize for her Piano Dramatique series, launched at Hamarikyu Asahi Hall in 2002. She herself conceived, produced and performed the four-CD Hyper Beatles series (Toshiba-EMI), for which leading contemporary composers were commissioned to write works on Beatles themes; one of the discs was chosen by The New York Times as a best CD of 1990. In the spring of 2006 she was invited to Berlin's MaerzMusik festival as pianist in residence, and her New York recital of Feldman's music that same year was named by the same paper as one of the best concerts of 2006. Her CDs Schubert: Piano Sonatas and Morton Feldman: Trio brought her the Minister of Education Award in the 2007 Art Encouragement Prizes, and her disc A Dangerous Night: Aki Takahashi Plays John Cage won the Excellence Prize at the 2008 Agency for Cultural Affairs National Arts Festival. In the autumn of 2011 she received the Medal with Purple Ribbon, and in 2014 the 23rd Asahi Prize for Contemporary Music. Her book Parlando: My Life at the Piano was published by Shunjusha in 2013. Camerata Tokyo