Pinner Music Festival – Maki Sekiya

Maki Sekiya

Our lunchtime recital is performed by virtuoso pianist Maki Sekiya, who gave her brilliant Wigmore Hall debut earlier this year. She has for some years been Musician-in-Residence at Green-Templeton College, Oxford. Born in Tokyo, she studied at The Purcell School and Moscow Conservatoire, has won many prizes, and gained honours (full marks) in her Performance Diploma at Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Beethoven’s popular Waldstein Sonata is finely crafted but also a technically exacting work from his middle years, written in the heroic manner. Yet it is also known as L’Aurora for the dawn-like opening of its third movement. She will then play a lovely reflective piece – Yumi no Kagami – by Japanese composer Somei Sato that she premiered a few years ago. To end she plays the colourful Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, in the extremely demanding original piano version. You will experience many images – from a gnome, chicks, cattle, through a castle, market, catacombs, children’s games, portraits of two Jewish men, and on to a witch’s hut and The (never built) Great Gate of Kyiv. Maki’s pianism will bring these splendidly to life, perhaps even more than the Viktor Hartmann paintings that inspired the work.