A sought-after chamber musician and soloist, Mika Sasaki, twenty-five, has established herself as a versatile pianist, equally at home in solo and collaborative performances. Debuting as a soloist with the Sinfonia of Cambridge and appearing twice with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra before her tenth birthday, Sasaki has performed frequently in the United States, Europe, and Japan. More recently, she was a recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center, where her performance of Schubert’s “Grand Duo” for Piano, Four Hands, was hailed as a “colorful reading of the work…[with] nuance and sensitivity to Schubert’s music” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). Other festival appearances include the Estherwood Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Yellow Barn Young Artists Program, Mannes Beethoven Institute, Icicle Creek International Chamber Music Festival, Accademia Musicale Chigiana, and Taos School of Music. Mika Sasaki grew up in Demarest, New Jersey, and began her studies with Olegna Fuschi at the Juilliard Pre-College Division in 1997 and studied there until she and her family moved to Tokyo, Japan. She returned to the United States to pursue her bachelor and master of music degrees at the Peabody Conservatory under the tutelage of Benjamin Pasternack. Sasaki is currently a C. V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at the Juilliard School, where she studies with Joseph Kalichstein and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in sight reading and secondary piano as a Teaching Fellow.
Music@Menlo Debut