pianist
Karin Kei Nagano: “As a child I hated practicing the piano”
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Karin Kei Nagano at the Inner Alster. She visits Hamburg at least once a year.
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Photo: Marcelo Hernandez
She is the daughter of conductor Kent Nagano and pianist Mari Kodama. Her third CD has just been released.
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Hamburg. “I have a big name” is one of the oldest programs on German television. For 44 years now, guessing teams have been trying weekly to find out which celebrity each studio guest is related to. Also Karin Kei Nagano would be a good candidate, the 22-year-old is the daughter of Hamburg’s general music director Kent Nagano and his wife, the pianist Mari Kodama. With “Reincarnation” she has just released her third CD on the Canadian Analekta label, on which she combines Schubert’s last piano sonata (from 1828) with an excerpt from Messiaen’s “Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus” (from 1944).
Normally Karin Kei Nagano would play a few concerts now to present the new recording live, but not only because of the Corona-Pandemie The native Californian, who grew up mainly in Paris, currently has other plans. She came to Hamburg to work in the office of designer Peter Schmidt after completing her architecture studies at Yale. She’ll be in town for a few weeks, she says, and that’s why she’ll finally be able to see her parents again for a longer period of time.
She started playing the piano at the age of three
How much Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama shaped the life of their only child becomes clear when the daughter talks about her childhood. She started playing the piano at the age of three, took part in her first competitions when she was six, and won when she was nine. In 2007 she also made her international concert debut with a Mozart piano concerto. She said she was “terribly nervous” before all these performances.
At first glance it doesn’t sound like a carefree childhood, but Karin Kei Nagano sees it differently: “Until I was eleven or twelve, I actually hated practicing, I thought it was terrible,” she recalls. “But a short time later, maybe I was 14, I realized that only persistence and perseverance really lead to a high level.” Certainly her childhood and youth were different from those of her friends (“I had a pretty strict daily schedule and my parents attached great importance to a basic cultural education. ”), but how intimate the relationship is is not only shown by current photos, for example from joint visits to the opera.
Surf afternoons together with my father
Karin also remembers surfing afternoons with her father with noticeable warmth. In Morro Bay, California, where Kent Nagano was born in 1951, they often spent many happy hours in the water. Both would have completely lost the feeling for the time and their father was such an enthusiastic surfer that he repeatedly used surf analogies during orchestra rehearsals to describe emotional sensitivities. In any case, she is very grateful for the education that her parents made possible for her, because “they always want to achieve the best possible – just like me”.
Even if the family is often separated for professional reasons, everyone comes together once a week via a zoom video conference. “Then we play chamber music with some very close friends or the solo repertoire we’re currently working on.” It doesn’t sound like duty when she talks about it, rather like a week’s highlight. Yes, she really likes this togetherness, confirms Karin Kei Nagano, and she appreciates the constructive criticism of her parents who always help her artistically.
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The first reviews of their CDs show how far. The specialist magazine “Gramophone”, number one among the classical publications worldwide, praised her “exquisite game” and her “great personality”, the Canadian daily “La Presse” awarded four stars for the current album. One of her mentors is Alfred Brendel, a piano legend with whom Mari Kodama also studied. Karin Schubert worked with him on Sonata in B flat major D 960, which can be found on “Reincarnation”. “I owe him many insights into the piece,” she says. He is explicitly mentioned in the CD booklet as someone “without whom this album would not have been possible”.
But Karin Kei Nagano’s life is by no means just about the piano. Your second great love is architecture. It was not for nothing, she explains with a smile, that Arthur Schopenhauer described architecture as “frozen music”. Whether rhythm, harmony or melody: Everything can be converted into a fixed form and can be found in the architecture. So far there are no concrete career plans, maybe everything will amount to a “tandem career” in which music and architecture are on an equal footing. Now she will first “be apprenticed” to designer Peter Schmidt, then she will see what happens next.
Her “big name” may have opened a few doors to Karin Kei Nagano so far, but she went through it herself every time – with her own talent and under her own steam.
