ARTISTS:   

Ellen Masaki Tribute Concert
Ann Krinitsky, conductor
Lisa Nakamichi, piano
       
Sean Kennard, piano
T.J. Tario, piano       
                                         

CONCERT:   

Wednesday, October 21, 7:30 p.m.
       
Doors open at 7 p.m.
       
Blaisdell Concert Hall
   

PROGRAM:   

ELGAR: Nimrod from Enigma Variations
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K.488 (Adagio)
            Lisa Nakamichi, piano
RACHMANINOFF: Concerto for Piano No. 2 op. 18 in C minor (Allegro vivace)
                T.J. Tario, piano
       
KHATCHARIAN: Sabre Dance
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, op.37 (Largo and Rondo -       Allegro)
            Sean Kennard, piano

TICKETS:   

FREE
       
Seating is open. No tickets required. Large groups are advised to arrive             when doors open at 7 p.m. to sit together.
       
Call the Box Office at (808) 792-2000 (weekdays) or (808) 524-0815 ext. 245 (evenings) for more information.
       
Honolulu – Hawaii’s music community will honor the legacy of renowned piano teacher Ellen Masaki at a free, family-oriented concert on Wednesday, October 21, 7:30 p.m. The concert will celebrate the values, music and inspiration that Masaki shared with hundreds of students throughout her more than 50-year teaching career. The Honolulu Symphony, led by Maestra Ann Krinitsky, is proud to join with Masaki’s former students, including concert pianists Lisa Nakamichi and Sean Kennard, in this tribute concert dedicated to Masaki’s memory. The concert program features works that Masaki held dear, including works by Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and more. In keeping with Masaki’s support of music education in Hawaii for people of all ages, admission to the concert is free and no tickets are required.

Highlights of the Ellen Masaki Tribute Concert promise to be the performance of young aspiring concert pianist, composer and Masaki student T.J. Tario, who will join the Symphony in Rachmaninoff’s dazzling Concerto for Piano No. 2. In addition, five gifted Masaki students will perform Khatcharian’s thrilling Sabre Dance on five pianos.

Everyone is invited and welcome to attend the Masaki’s legacy of music and inspiration for Hawaii! For more information, please visit www.honolulusymphony.com, www.lisanakamichi.com and www.seankennard.com.

In Loving Memory – Ellen Masaki
Ellen Masaki grew up in Kalihi, the first daughter in a close-knit family of six. As her family home was always open to friends and extended family, Ellen’s childhood was shaped by happy sing-along evenings and dinners shared with unexpected company. When Ellen was five, her aunt taught her a piece called “Falling Waters.” Her easy grasp of the music gave her mother, Margaret Kimura, the incentive to purchase a used spinet piano. That piano became the center of Ellen’s life and transformed her into the musician she was destined to become.

Ellen’s developmental years coincided with the turmoil of World War II and her father’s move from the work force at a large automobile company to his own auto body repair business. Despite some hard times, Ellen continued with her music and was soon recognized by school officials as a musical asset. As a result, she spent many grade and high school days being taken out of class to perform at various school and State functions. She played the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto for a school assembly in the eighth grade, and was recruited to play the pipe organ for Sunday services at a nearby church. After high school she left for the Manhattan School of Music in New York to study, then came home to continue at the University of Hawaii, got married and raised two daughters, Karen and Nancy.

Ellen’s musical training evolved from an impressive array of musical mentors, who recognized her gifts and lent her their art and expertise. From that, Ellen was able to formulate her own unique and incredibly successful teaching style. Early on, she began to see a pattern of progress in her younger students that belied many widely recognized tenets of musical pedagogy. Her attempts to coax maximum skill levels and musical interpretation from her young students at the earliest stage possible were spectacularly successful. Ellen stripped each piece of music to its core, employing with her students the concepts of simple to complex, slow to fast, and endless repetition. She devised creative exercises to build on that foundation, which allowed her students to reach levels of musical artistry and technical perfection they never thought possible. She was intent on her students’ attainment of excellence on the keyboard as a means of “touching” art in its most intimate form.

Using every technique, strategy, educational theory and psychological ploy at her disposal, Ellen was able to urge her students on to longer practice sessions to reach the height of perfection she constantly demanded from their musical selections. She arranged for workshops, recitals, solo performances, paid concerts, local and national piano competitions, appearances around the islands, and seized every opportunity for her students to perform so that they could maintain a consistent level of excellence while they studied with her. Her innovations and efforts yielded a staggering list of accomplishments:

•    Masaki students ranging in age from ages six to 18 have performed concerto movements with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra more than 175 times since 1963.
•    The prestigious Morning Music Club of Hawaii has awarded Masaki students more than 40 scholarships.
•    Masaki students have regularly won sweeping awards at the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) annual competitions, winning the Baldwin Junior High and High School categories almost every year for more than 20 years and qualifying for the national regional competitions. Four Masaki students have surpassed the regionals to compete in the MTNA finals.
•    Seven of the Masaki protégées have been featured in the Musical Encounter series, a weekly television musical highlighting special talents in Hawaii in the 1970s. That program was shown nationally on PBS and picked up by the Japanese media, and has been part of the video archives with Hawaii’s Department of Education.
•    Four of the young musicians on Musical Encounter were subsequently invited by the Tokyo Junior Philharmonic Orchestra to perform in Japan with the orchestra and their conductor, Maestro Setsuo Tsukahara, in December of 1974. One of the pianists from the group, at age 14, was asked to perform the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto with the Tokyo Junior Philharmonic Orchestra at The White House.
•    For many years, Masaki was the official accompanist for the Metropolitan Opera finalists from Australia and New Zealand. As National Guild of Piano Teachers Association’s Hawaii chairperson for more than thirty years, she accommodated approximately 1,000 students and 75 teachers in annual standardized auditions with adjudicators from every part of the country. She herself served as an adjudicator in the Young Keyboard Artists Association’s International Competition in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
•    In 1990, Masaki was one of ten teachers nation-wide invited to Moscow with selected students to exchange musical ideas with their Russian counterparts, take part in private master classes, and perform in recitals for Russian audiences in the first Soviet-American piano forum held at the Gnessin Institute in Moscow.
•    In 1991, Masaki purchased Thayer Piano Co. Ltd., venturing into the retailing of fine pianos.
•    Masaki applied student Sean Kennard to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he was accepted in 1998 and became the first piano student from Hawaii to attend the renowned institution. Kennard was invited to perform in Poland after winning the First Chopin International Competition of the Pacific at age 11. He has since performed in concerts in Japan, Europe and the United States and won high honors in many national and international competitions, among them first place in the International Competition in South America. He was also the first place winner of the Doctor Luis Sigell International Music Competition in Vina Del Mar, Chile.
•    In 1998, Masaki was the featured soloist with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra in its premiere presentation of Tobias Picker’s “Kilauea,” which was written in her honor. That performance won rave reviews in both the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star Bulletin.
•    In 2003, Masaki was named the first Teacher of the Year by the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA). She was flown to Michigan to receive the honor, which recognized “teachers who go far beyond the call of duty to exemplify excellence in the field of music”.
•    Masaki’s 75th birthday in 2003 was celebrated by the Honolulu Symphony Society with a series of events that included a banquet at a Waikiki hotel, a concert with André Watts and Sean Kennard, a solo recital by Jon Nakamatsu, and the debut of a new Steinway Concert Grand piano dedicated to Masaki and named “The Masaki Grand.” She was recognized for her tireless efforts to gain support and raise funds for the symphony over the years.
•    Masaki was named an MTNA Foundation Fellow in 2007.
•    In 2005, 2006 and 2008, Masaki’s students were featured in separate segments of From The Top, the popular NPR program that featured promising young classical musicians around the country.
•    In the Oahu Arts Center’s Mozart Festival in 2008, Masaki students won first and second place honors in the Junior High and first, second and third place wins in the High School division.
•    The fourth Stecher and Horowitz New York Piano Competition in 2008 selected 22 pianists worldwide for that year’s event, two of them were Masaki students.
•    Masaki was a major supporter of the annual Aloha International Piano Festival and Competition, founded and organized by Lisa Nakamichi. The event features concert artists, workshops, recitals and piano competitions. Many Masaki students participated and competed successfully in the competitions.
•    The first annual Hawaii Youth Symphony Concerto competition was held this year, with two of Masaki’s students selected to perform with the orchestra. The concert, scheduled for December 6, 2009, will be dedicated to Masaki.
•    The Masaki School of Music students have staged the annual Christmas Extravaganza at Ala Moana Shopping Center for the past 26 years. This Masaki project has brought students of all ages together for ensemble practice with as many as 10 pianos playing simultaneously.
•    All of Masaki’s students have shared their musical works with communities here and on the mainland, on television, radio, schools and retirement homes, at City and State functions. Many of her former students are now creating musical artists and enthusiasts here in Hawaii, nationwide from Seattle to New York and around the world from Japan to Europe.

Music has been a springboard into other fields of learning for all of Masaki’s students. They have gone on to college and post-graduate work at such institutions as Oberlin, Juilliard, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the Universities of Washington, Michigan, Chicago, Pennsylvania, California and Hawaii, with professional degrees in medicine, law, business, education and the arts.

Notable among Masaki’s students who have pursued their destinies in music are Lisa Nakamichi, PhD Juilliard, who is now a concert pianist splitting her time between Japan and the United States; Brian Masuda, University of Hawaii and Manhattan School of Music, a celebrated choral director previously working in Amsterdam; Sean Kennard, Curtis Institute, and now a concert pianist; and Donna Bender, founder of a music school in Seattle, Washington, and winning awards with her own students.

Despite her many achievements and awards, Masaki’s greatest legacy is her students, and the influence she had on each one of them years after their piano lessons ceased. She gave them the means to take their music from the bare essentials to a finished, beautiful product, and along the way, inspired them to work towards perfection in every aspect of their lives.

In January 2009, a ten-year-old gastric cancer that was in remission returned and took hold of Masaki’s lungs, and ultimately her life on September 7, 2009. She leaves two daughters, classical contemporary dancer Karen Masaki (Paul Freeman) and Nancy Masaki Hathaway, cellist and member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra; two grandsons, Scott and Logan Hathaway; a brother, Ernest Kimura; two sisters, Lillian Nishi and Mildred Oshiro.