Pianist Mitsuko Uchida has received Denmark’s Léonie Sonning Music Prize, that nation’s most prestigious arts award.
The prize, announced earlier this month, carries a cash award of $1 million Danish kroners (equivalent to $150,000 U.S.).
“Mitsuko Uchida is one of the most exceptional pianists in the world of classical music,“ said Esben Tange, board chairman of the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation. ”With great personal integrity and an intensely emotional presence, she has spent more than four decades creating luminous interpretations of the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Arnold Schoenberg, in particular. With her extraordinarily concentrated style of playing, in which extremes — from the quietest moments to dramatic outbursts — often come into play, Mitsuko Uchida is able to create magical moments for her audiences.”
Uchida, who will perform in a CSP Piano recital Jan. 31, will receive the Sonning Prize at a gala concert in Copenhagen next May. It will mark her first concert in Denmark in more than 20 years. “I am deeply honored to receive the prestigious Léonie Sonning Music Prize and look highly forward to being in Copenhagen soon,” Uchida said.
In Denmark, she has previously performed at the Tivoli Concert Hall and appeared as soloist with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra under Kurt Sanderling. Her most recent performances in Denmark came in 2006, when she played Schubert and participated in performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in two concerts at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, just north of Copenhagen.
At Uchida’s gala concert at the DR Concert Hall, she will give a recital with music by four composers who have played a central role in her artistic life: Joseph Haydn, Arnold Schoenberg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert. The program will consist of Haydn’s Variations in F Minor, Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor and Schubert’s four Impromptus, D. 935. As such. the program traces back to Vienna and to a repertoire that Uchida has favored since her student years.
Now based in London, but born in Japan, Uchida grew up there; at age of 12, she moved with her family to Vienna. There her bond with classical music proved decisive. She later studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and the music of Vienna has remained a constant throughout her artistic life.
