MIDORI GOES TO SCHOOL

posted by James Reel

All right, now we’re getting caught up with my contributions to Strings magazine. The current issue contains my cover feature on Midori’s ambitious efforts as a music educator:

Yes, it took tireless practice and dedication for Midori Goto, at age 11, to become a pigtailed prodigy playing in the world’s most prominent halls. But now that the violinist is in her 30s, instead of coasting through a conventional concert career, she’s working even harder. Not content to merely show up and play, Midori has positioned herself as today’s leading performer-educator. She wedges concert engagements into a remarkably full schedule that includes chairing the strings department and holding the Jascha Heifetz Chair in Violin at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. She also creates community-engagement events in the United States and Asia through her Orchestral Residencies Program and projects called Music Sharing, Midori & Friends, and Partners in Performance. Consider her datebook this past February. At the beginning of the month, Midori did a week-long Orchestra Residency Program in Des Moines, Iowa. Midmonth, she joined the Miró Quartet, Marc-André Hamelin, and Johannes Moser in the first two of three programs of a series she devised for New York’s Lincoln Center that examines the musical influences and cultures of Tōru Takemitsu and Alfred Schnittke. At the end of February, she took off on a European recital tour with pianist Charles Abramovic. All this, and USC, too. “She’s a force of nature,” declares Margaret Batjer, Midori’s USC faculty colleague and concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. “She has more energy and more ideas and is more on the ball than anyone I know. It’s amazing to me that she has this whole other life beyond what she does at USC, because her commitment here seems to be full-time to us.”

You can find the full story here.