Please note: Advance reservations are no longer available. A standby line outside the main museum entrance will begin at 6:15 p.m. and guests will be seated on a first-come, first-served basis if seating is available after 6:50 p.m. Doors close at 7 p.m.
Menil members have exclusive access to the November 21 performance. A second performance, open to the public, will take place the following evening.
Maki Namekawa performs sonatas by Mozart Camargo Guarnieri, Berg, Mendelssohn, and Philip Glass’s First Piano Sonata (2019). Namekawa is a leading figure among today’s pianists, bringing to audiences’ attention contemporary music by international composers. As a soloist and a chamber musician equally at home in classical and repertoire of our time, she performs regularly at international venues such as Suntory Hall Tokyo, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center New York, Davies Symphony Hall San Francisco, Barbican Center and Cadogan Hall London, and Cité de la Musique Paris. Namekawa is a close collaborator of renowned composer Philip Glass and tours regularly with him. In 2019 Glass composed his First Piano Sonata especially for her. She premiered it in the presence of the composer on July 4 at Piano Festival Ruhr in Germany, and will premiere it in Texas at the Menil Collection.
A reception with the artist will be held immediately following the performance.
About the performer:
Maki Namekawa studied piano at Kunitachi Conservatory in Tokyo with Mikio Ikezawa and Henriette Puig-Roget. In 1994 she won the Leonid Kreutzer Prize. In 1995 she continued her studies with Werner Genuit and Kaya Han at Musikhochschule Karlsruhe, where she completed her diploma as a soloist with special distinction. She went on to perfect her artistry in Classical-Romantic repertoire with Edith Picht-Axenfeld, and in contemporary music with Pierre-Laurent Aimard at Musikhochschule Köln, György Kurtág, Stefan Litwin and Florent Boffard.