MIDORI Biography The 2007-2008 season marks violinist Midori’s first quarter-century before the public. In a year characteristically replete with activity, Midori will play over 90 concerts, making six trips to Europe and three to Asia. Among the highlights of Midori’s season will be bringing a unique project to Lincoln Center combining the music of J.S.Bach, Takemitsu and Schnittke; traveling to Florida with the Cleveland Orchestra and to Japan with the Philadelphia Orchestra; making her third all-new music recital tour, this time to Europe; devoting significant energy to her myriad community engagement initiatives in the U.S. and in Asia, and significantly increasing her commitment to USC’s Thornton School of Music, as she assumes the position of Chair of the Strings Department in September. Also in the 2007-2008 season, Midori will be featured on a new Sony BMG Masterworks release - sonatas of J.S.Bach (No.2 in A minor) and Bartók (No.1 in C-sharp minor) - with pianist Robert McDonald.
Midori’s season begins with appearances - either in performance or in master classes - at ten summer music festivals, including the Dubrovnik, Schleswig-Holstein, MDR Musiksommer, and Oregon Bach festivals. In the fall Midori will appear with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach (with whom she will also perform in Japan at season’s end), and the National Symphony under Leonard Slatkin, followed by a U.S. recital tour with pianist Robert McDonald. Midori will make three additional recital tours in the 2007-2008 season, one more in the U.S. with Robert McDonald, and two to Europe with pianist Charles Abramovic. Midori’s spring new music tour with Mr.Abramovic will feature the music of MacMillan, Penderecki, Lindberg and Adams, plus a number of new compositions commissioned for the occasion by her European presenters. Aside from her appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Symphony, Midori’s concerto engagements for the season include performances with the RSO Frankfurt with Hugh Wolff, the National Arts Centre Orchestra under Ludovic Morlot, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Sir Charles Mackerras, the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero (in both Cleveland and at the Orchestra’s annual residency in Florida), the LSO with Daniel Harding, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic with Jirí Belohlávek. Midori’s time is increasingly taken up with five outreach initiatives she has established to address an issue she believes to be of crucial and ever-growing importance: access. Midori feels passionately that people must have access to a variety of great music, regardless of their age, race, social class, geographic location, or financial means. The first organization she founded to tackle this issue was Midori & Friends, started in 1992 in response to serious cutbacks in music education in New York City schools; over the last 15 years, over 140,000 children have benefitted from this program. Midori & Friends provides comprehensive music education (including instrument instruction and general music instruction), workshops and concerts to children who might not otherwise have the opportunity for involvement in the arts. The foundation is now partnered with numerous public schools in New York City. Midori performs at many of the schools, and so also do musicians representing other musical genres, from jazz players to African drummers to Chinese flutists, and more. Midori & Friends now also presents an all-day children’s music festival annually in New York City. Midori has also founded a similar organization in Japan, Music Sharing. Music Sharing concentrates on music education for young people with a special focus on both Western classical music and traditional Japanese music, including instrument instruction for the disabled. The programs, which are offered in public schools, children’s hospitals and special institutions, place an emphasis on active audience participation and collaboration. Music Sharing also has important programs for future teachers and young musicians. This season Music Sharing will sponsor an International Community Engagement Program - its second program outside Japan - in Cambodia. The ICEP is a training program for aspiring musicians who are chosen internationally by audition each year; the program offers these young people exposure to different cultures, community work and involvement, cultural exchange, and the opportunity to collaborate in a learning environment with Midori and the host country’s local musicians. Last year the program was conducted, with great success, in Vietnam. From the money she won as part of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize (2001), in 2003 Midori created another non-profit organization, Partners in Performance. The aim of PiP is to broaden the audience for chamber music by bringing high profile chamber music performances to small community-based organizations in the U.S. Among the communities where PiP has been presented since its inception are Randolph, Vermont; Manasquan, New Jersey; Plymouth, New Hampshire; Elmer, New Jersey; Barron, Wisconsin; Richland, Washington and McHenry, Maryland. In the 2007-08 season, Midori will conduct Partners in Performance programs in four small communities in Montana and in Minnesota. At the outset of the 2003-2004 season, Midori inaugurated a series of residencies - the University Residencies Program - each to involve 10 to 14 day visits to universities (spread out over two years) by Midori and other artists. The first of these programs took place at North Park University in Chicago in November 2003, and served as the prototype for future residencies, of which Midori will initiate one per year. The object of the residencies is to strengthen ties among the artists, students, faculty, and University-affiliated presenters; she invites the participation of music majors and non-majors alike in planning and coordinating events. Midori gives two recitals as part of the residency, and where possible, also includes concerto performances with affiliated university orchestras. 2004-2005 marked the inauguration of Midori’s Orchestra Residencies Program, in which she spends a week with a local youth orchestra which has ties to a small professional orchestra; Midori performs with both orchestras, coaching young musicians, appearing at benefits and subscription series concerts and working with both orchestras to raise arts awareness within the community. Orchestra Residencies Programs have been conducted in Alaska (Fairbanks and Anchorage), Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont, Montana and North Carolina. In 2007-2008, there will be Orchestra Residencies in South Dakota and Iowa. In the 2002-2003 season, Midori created a series of concerts and appearances called Total Experience in small, outlying Japanese towns. This series involved experimentation with thematic concepts and proactive audience participation. In 2005, Midori created another Total Experience model, this time in collaboration with arts management majors at universities in Niigata and Atsugi, Japan. Midori’s commitment to education extends beyond her community engagement efforts to her work with young violinists in master classes all over the world. This is in addition to her duties as both Jascha Heifetz Chair and co-director of the Midori Center for Community Engagement at USC’s Thornton School of Music, which include private violin instruction, chamber music coaching and devising a curriculum in community engagement studies. At USC, Midori actively performs with her students both on and off campus. Midori and violinist Vadim Repin have joined forces in a new initiative, the Midori/Repin Commissioning Project. Through Meet the Composer’s New Music, New Donors program, individual donors will commission four solo works, each four minutes in length, to be used by the violinists as encores and in personal appearances in a variety of contexts, including fundraising events, media promotion and community work. Midori and Repin have chosen four composers whose work they admire, and of the first group of compositions to be commissioned, two have been completed: Passeggiata by Lee Hyla, and Gypsy Melody by Rodion Shchedrin. To date, the commissioners include Susan V. Carson, Kathleen Henschel, Barrett Wissman, and Crystal Arts. Midori made her first recording at the age of 14 for Philips - she played music of Bach and Vivaldi with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Pinchas Zukerman. She now records exclusively for Sony BMG. In 2003 Sony Classical released her recording of the Bruch G minor and Mendelssohn E minor concertos, recorded live with the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Mariss Jansons. This recording won Germany’s coveted Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, as did her recording of French recital repertoire with pianist Robert McDonald. The first Super Audio CD issued by Sony Classical featured Midori’s recording of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, K.320d, with violist Nobuko Imai, as well as the reconstructed Concerto in D Major for Violin and Piano (K.315f) with Christoph Eschenbach as both pianist and conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra. Other concerto recordings include a disk pairing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No.1, both recorded live with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic; the Dvo_ák Violin Concerto with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, also recorded live; the two Bartók Violin Concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic under Mr. Mehta; and the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, with Mr. Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. Among Midori’s other Sony Classical CDs is a Grammy-nominated recording of the Paganini Caprices for Solo Violin. Midori’s recorded collaborations with Robert McDonald include a recording of the Elgar and Franck sonatas, and Encore_, a collection of virtuoso showpieces. Sony’s live recording of Midori’s Carnegie Hall recital debut (October 1990), is also available on CD. In 2004, Midori joined the ranks of published authors with the release in Germany of a memoir titled Einfach Midori (Simply Midori), for the publisher Henschel Verlag. Midori was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971 and began studying the violin with her mother, Setsu Goto, at a very early age. In 1982, when Zubin Mehta first heard her play, he was so impressed that he invited her to be a surprise guest soloist for the New York Philharmonic’s traditional New Year’s Eve concert, on which occasion she received a standing ovation and the impetus to begin a major career. Midori lives in Los Angeles. In 2000, she received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Gender Studies at the Gallatin School of New York University, graduating magna cum laude, and in 2005 received her Master’s degree in Psychology. Away from school and the concert hall, Midori enjoys reading, writing and attending the theater. Her violin is the 1734 Guarnerius del Gesu “ex-Huberman”, which is on lifetime loan to her from the Hayashibara Foundation. She uses three bows, two by Dominique Peccatte and the third by François Peccatte. For more information, visit www.gotomidori.com |
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Midori Discography (14titles)
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