[085] MTSU’s Keyboard Artist Series launches new season with Sunday concert

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Internationally acclaimed pianist Manabu Takasawa will help the MTSU School of Music commence the third year of its popular “Keyboard Artist Series” with a wide-ranging public concert set for Sunday, Sept. 17.

Takasawa’s performance will begin at 2 p.m. Sept. 17 in the Hinton Music Hall inside MTSU’s Wright Music Building. A campus map is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap, and admission is $10 for the general public and $5 for seniors. Children under age 18 will be admitted free, as will MTSU students with a valid ID.

The 2017-18 concert series, sponsored in part by the Steinway Piano Gallery of Nashville, once again features MTSU faculty and distinguished guest artists from around the world.

Takasawa, a premier example, made his solo recital debut at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1992 after coming to the United States from his native Japan to continue his musical training. He is now a professor of music at the University of Rhode Island and creator and director of the URI Piano Extravaganza!, an annual piano festival of concerts and a competition for the university community and surrounding areas.

Interested in discovering unfamiliar yet worthwhile music, Takasawa has recorded music by women composers and performed music of contemporary Japanese composers as well as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. As a member of Duo Anno 1647, he and flutist Kristen Stoner toured recently in Paris, Dublin, and Newcastle, Australia.

During his MTSU Arts-sponsored concert, Takasawa is scheduled to perform favorites by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Liszt as well as works by other composers in a performance list that  includes:

• Beethoven’s 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor, WoO 80.
• Yoshihiro Kanno’s Stone Gate.
• Amy Beach’s Fire-Flies, Op. 15 No. 4.
• Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Manchega: Étude de concert.
• Liszt’s "Value d’Obermann" from Years of Pilgrimage I: Suisse.
• William Bolcom’s The Serpent’s Kiss: Rag Fantasy.

You can get a preview of Takasawa’s work at https://youtu.be/zcCgBKwL6qs.

The 2017-18 Keyboard Artist Series also features four more concerts in Hinton Hall, including an Oct. 5 performance by Chung-Ang University music professor Yoosun Kang; a Nov. 12 concert by Arunesh Nadgir, coordinator of keyboard studies for MTSU’s School of Music; a Jan. 22 recital by Steinway artist and Guizhou Normal University piano department director Cheng-Feng Hsieh; and an April 8 concert by David Viscoli, piano professor and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

For more information on the Keyboard Artist Series at MTSU, visit http://www.mtsu.edu/music/keyboardseries.php. For details on other concerts in the MTSU School of Music, call 615-898-2493 or visit http://www.mtsumusic.com and click on the "Concert Calendar" link.