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Delta State to present piano duo recital series during new academic year

By August 20, 2009General

Rika Uchida

 

The Department of Music at Delta State University will present a piano duo recital series during the academic year of 2009-2010.

Each recital features a guest artist and a Delta State piano faculty member. The first recital in the series will be held on Monday, August 31, at 7:30 p.m. in the Recital Hall of the Bologna Performing Arts Center.

The performers include guest artist, Dr. Rika Uchida, and Dr. Kumiko Shimizu, assistant professor of music at Delta State. The program includes the piano duo repertoire, either originally written for the medium or transcribed for it, by Isaac Albéniz (Enrique Granados as the transcriber), Paul Bowles, Claude Debussy, Jean Françaix, Carlos Guastavino, and Maurice Ravel.

Uchida teaches piano and theory at Drake University. She received her M.A. in Music Theory and D.M.A. in Piano Performance from the University of Oregon. As additional studies, she has been coached by John Browning and Karl Ulrich Schnabel. Prior to her appointment to Drake University, she taught at the College of Wooster in Ohio and at the University of Oregon.
She has a special love for the works composed in the early twentieth century by Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Scriabin. She performed Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto as a winner of the Concerto Competition at the University of Oregon, for which she received the Outstanding Performance Award from the University. Her master’s thesis, Tonal Ambiguity in Debussy’s Piano Music, traced the evolution of Debussy’s new compositional techniques; her D.M.A. lecture-document, The New Language of Debussy’s Douze Etudes, presented the structural analysis of selected Douze Etudes and performance interpretation. She plans to perform complete piano works by Debussy in the future.
Uchida will share her knowledge from the researches with the music students in a lecture/master class, The piano music of Debussy – from early to late period,” on Tuesday, Sept. 1, at 1:30 p.m. in the Recital Hall of the Bologna Performing Arts Center. 

The recital and lecture/master class are funded by Delta State University.

The recital is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the department of music at (662) 846-4615.