Crossroads of Japanese Music: Yumi Kurosawa and Friends

Published: 12 May 2022
on channel: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

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Japanese musician and composer Yumi Kurosawa performs on a modern twenty-string koto and is joined by violinist Emil Israel Chudnovsky and Chinese flute (dizi) virtuoso Yimin Miao. Their program features classical music from Japan and China as well as new music composed by Kurosawa for this event inspired by the Freer Gallery of Art exhibition Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan.

Since winning the National Japanese Koto Competition and moving to the United States, Kurosawa has performed at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, Blue Note (New York), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), and venues across Europe. She has appeared with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Swan in the United Kingdom (where she premiered Daron Hagen’s koto concerto Genji), and the Houston Grand Opera.

The New York Times called Kurosawa “an inventive, seemingly cosmopolitan composer . . . [who] presents her themes gracefully and then undertakes intricate, sometimes adventurous variations, drawing on a timbral palette that ranged from warm and rounded to bright and metallic.” All About Jazz noted that, when she plays, “the koto’s notes flow like the water of a stream in a Zen garden, building melodic paths in a logic that resembles European medieval and Renaissance music.”

Violinist Emil Israel Chudnovsky recently made his debut at the Seoul Arts Center with the KammerSymphonie Berlin and made his inaugural recording with the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed as soloist with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco in Mexico and the Orquesta de la Ciudad de los Reyes in Lima, Peru. He has appeared in chamber music ensembles at the Newport Music Festival and Germany’s Henselt Festival and in concert at New York’s Merkin Hall and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan
https://asia.si.edu/exhibition/mind-o...

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