The Japanese pianist Utako Endo at MKLA Music

Born in 1998 and living temporarily in Düsseldorf, Utako Endo began playing the piano at the age of five. Her training took her to Tokyo University of the Arts from 2016 to 2018, then to the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. She completed her bachelor's degree in 2020 and her master's degree two years later. She won several prizes in prestigious competitions during her studies. The concert, a collaboration between the MKLA Music Festival and the Joachim Raff Society, begins with Mozart's Sonata No. 9 in D major K. 311, a work in which the composer, bursting with ideas, took up elements of modern orchestral music and wove them into a lively whole with song-like and dance-like passages. Joachim Raff, who also wrote sonatas at the beginning of his career, appears here with his Introduction et Allegro scherzoso op. 87, a work that bears witness to the influence of his spiritual teacher Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Here and in Raff's much-played salon piece La Fileuse, his technical sophistication and sense of structural elegance are revealed.

Franz Liszt's paraphrase of Verdi's Rigoletto, on the other hand, takes up the opera's dramatic quartet, in which Rigoletto confronts his daughter Gilda with the unscrupulous actions of the duke she loves. Liszt succeeds masterfully in transferring the emotions of the opera to the piano keys and shedding a new light on the story. The program concludes with Sergei Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme by Corelli, an epic work from the 1930s that marks a powerful conclusion to Rachmaninov's career as a Romantic piano virtuoso. This concert offers an extraordinary opportunity to experience the diversity of the piano repertoire and the impressive virtuosity of Utako Endo. (Severin Kolb)

The concert is a cooperation between the MKLA Music Festival and the Joachim Raff Society, Lachen.


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