Momo Kodama
Born in Osaka, Momo Kodama spent her earliest years in Germany before moving to France to enter the class of Germaine Mounier at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique, Paris. She went on to work with such eminent pianists as Murray Perahia, András Schiff, Vera Gornostaeva and Tatiana Nikolaïeva and in 1991 became the youngest-ever winner of the Munich Competition.

Having established an extraordinary career in Japan, performing with the foremost orchestras (the NHK Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, New Japan Philharmonic) she has been invited by the world’s leading conductors - Seiji Ozawa, Dutoit, Inbal, Gergiev, Foster, Nagano, Norrington – to perform with orchestras all over Europe and America including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, RAI Orchestra, Turin, Berlin Radio Symphony, Deutsche Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre de la Fondation Gulbenkian, l’Orchestre National de Montpellier, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg etc.

Highlights of the 2011/12 season included performances of Turangalila with Andre Previn and the NHK Symphony, Saint-Saëns No. 2 with Charles Dutoit, the Ravel Left hand concerto with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester under Kent Nagano as well as Momo’s first collaboration with Christian Tetzlaff (playing the Mendelssohn Double concerto) with whom she has since performed in recital.

The season also saw Momo’s debut at the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival as well as the first edition of the ‘Momo Kodama Piano Fantasie’ with concerts in Tokyo and Kyoto, for which Momo was awarded the Saji Keizo Prize by the Suntory Foundation. The project will span five years and each year Momo will commission a new work from a composer of her choice.

A dedicated chamber musician, Momo’s chamber partners include Steven Isserlis, Rohan de Saram, Renaud Capucon, Augustin Dumay and Jörg Widmann. As a recitalist, Momo is invited to the Wigmore Hall, Tonhalle Zürich, the Marlboro, Verbier, Lucerne, Davos and Berlin festivals, La Roque d’Anthéron, Chopin à Bagatelle, Festival d’Automne à Paris, the Tivoli Festival (Copenhagen), Enesco Festival (Bucarest), Settembre Musica-Torino, Schleswig-Holstein, and the Folles Journées in Nantes, Tokyo and Rio to which she has been invited each year since 2004.

Along with her sister Mari Kodama, Momo forms a much-in-demand piano duo performing all the established repertoire – Mozart with Frans Bruggen and Ensemble orchestral de Paris, Martinu with the Montpellier Symphony Orchestra and Lawrence Foster – as well as giving premieres of new works including the first performance of the concerto by Jean Pascal Beintus, which they will perform in November 2012 with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra and Kent Nagano.

A large part of Momo’s repertoire is consecrated to modern and contemporary music. At the request of Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, she premiered Messiaen’s Fantaisie pour violon and piano (written in 1933 but never performed in public) with Isabelle Faust at La Roque d’Anthéron. In 2008, Momo devoted much of her time to a large Messiaen project in Japan for which she received several awards and which Mostly Classic magazine cited as being one of the top three concert series of the year.

Momo is also the dedicatee of Lichtstudie 3 by Jörg Widmann (premièred at the Lucerne Festival) and Echo by Ichiro Nodaira (performed in Berkeley and Berlin), Toshio Hosokawa’s piano concerto Lotus under the moonlight (given its world premiere with the NDR Symphony Orchestra Hamburg/Jun Maerkl, and its Japanese premier with Seiji Ozawa and the Mito Chamber Orchestra). In 2008, she commissioned Toshio Hosokawa's Stunden Blumen, a work with the same instrumentation as Messiaen's Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, and performed both pieces at the Lucerne Festival with Xavier Phillips, and Carolin and Jörg Widmann. Performances of the work followed in Paris, Hamburg, and Vienna.

After two highly acclaimed recordings - a Debussy recital in 2002 and a Chopin recital in 2003 – Momo Kodama released the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus by Olivier Messiaen, which, according to Classica magazine, ‘takes its place alongside three greats: Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, Roger Muraro and Pierre-Laurent Aimard‘. It was followed by her recording on TRITON of the Catalogue d’oiseaux, which she performed in its entirety at La Roque D'Anthéron in August 2009 and which she will perform at the Festival Messiaen au Pays de la Meije in 2013. In late 2012, Momo will record a new CD of works by Ravel and Messiaen on ECM.