Eriko Takezawa 

 

 

The pianist and organist Eriko Takezawa, who was born in Hiroshima, Japan, began learning piano at the age of five. In 1984 she moved to Germany and studied with Naoyuki Taneda and Wolfgang Manz at the Karlsruhe Music Academy. She took additional master classes with Jürgen Uhde, Edith Picht-Axenfeld, Detlev Kraus, and Sergei Dorenski. In 1994 she won the International Piano Competition in Ostuni, Italy, and she has garnered a total of five awards at various competitions as part of a piano duo with Christoph Sischka. Ever since then they have given concerts throughout Europe as well as in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. A focus of Takezawa’s work as an artist is on chamber music, as seen in her partnerships with such woodwind players as the oboists Thomas Indermühle and Ingo Goritzki and the flutists Renate Greiss-Armin, Sergio Azzolini, and Angela Firkins. She regularly concertizes in particular with the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich, whether playing organ or piano, and they have performed in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Japan, Brazil, and the United States. In 2013 the pair played Shostakovich’s Concerto for Trumpet and Piano with the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra under Joshua Weilerstein. In 2014 Takezawa went on a tour with the recently founded Quatuor l’Even-tail to Basel, Bremen, and Berlin. She works as a rehearsal pianist at various conservatories, including at the Karlsruhe Music Academy, the Basel Music Academy, and the Academy for Performing Arts in Frankfurt am Main and, since 2014, at the Aarhus Royal Music Academy in Denmark. Her artistry has been documented on eight recordings.