Sasha Sound and Mari Kawamura: piano 4-hands concert
Saturday September 16, 7:30 p.m.
Sasha Sound is a concert and jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and music educator. He received DMA from the University of Iowa. In 2014 as a member of Ephawk Quartet he performed Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. The concert tour in western Iowa has gained considerable resonance, the performance was regarded in the media as “miraculous.” The same year Mr. Burdin accepted a fellowship at Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, MA. In 2015 Sasha and his colleagues Thiago Ancelmo, clarinet, and Andrew Uhe, violin, have formed Nashat Trio. They performed works By Bartok, Milhaud, Khachaturian and Schostakovich, and appeared as a featured ensemble at Laredo Music Festival 2016. In 2015 -2016 season Sasha Burdin participated in Johnson County Landmark jazz band as a principal pianist, performing with guest artists – Carmen Bradford (former singer at Count Basie’s Jazz Band) and Melvin Butler (Brian Blade Fellowship Band). In 2016 Sasha Burdin founded The Sasha Burdin Quartet, performing original compositions and pieces from standard jazz repertoire. In 2016 he started a collaboration with Rachel Joselson, soprano, and Scott Conklin, violin on Medtner’s music. The collaboration soon resulted in a series of concerts, and CD Ich denke dein: Songs and Chamber Works of Nikolai Medtner. As a part of his doctoral project, Sasha Burdin recorded a number of Medtner’s piano solo works, including rarely performed Second Improvisation, op.47. A new CD with these recordings is getting ready to be released in 2019.
Mari Kawamura is a concert pianist whose curiosity has taken her in a variety of directions ranging from improvisation and dance to biology and physics. Kawamura is drawn to music, which utilizes the entirety of the piano as an expressive device. She is as equally fascinated by works that showcase the tremendous agility of the instrument, as by compositions that explore its ability to produce cavernous resonances, complex spectral sounds, and unpitched noise. Her repertoire includes music by William Byrd, Scriabin, Xenakis, and Japanese composers such as Toru Takemitsu and Michio Mamiya. Kawamura has also collaborated with a number of living composers, premiering new works by Joseph Bourdeau, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Lil Lacy, and Anthony Vine, among many others.
Kawamura has presented solo recitals on concert series hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, University of Northern Colorado, Piano Spheres, MONK Space in Los Angeles, and Center for New Music in San Francisco. She has appeared in major festivals, such as Tanglewood Music Center, Spoleto Festival USA, Darmstadt International Summer Course, and SICPP in Boston, at which her 2013 performance of Xenakis’ Dikthas was described as “an unrelenting volcanic eruption” by NEWMUSICBOX. In 2019, Kawamura was featured on Jeffrey Holmes’ album, “May the Bridges I Burn Light My Way,” and in the Fall of 2020, she toured Denmark with Anna Jalving and Morten Lohmann Soenders, to premiere Lil Lacy’s piano trio, “Plant Native.