Hiroaki Takenouchi will travel to Germany this month to give a recital at the Rarities of Piano Music Festival in Husum, Germany.
Hiroaki will give two performances of his hour-long programme featuring works by Percy Sherwood, Dorothy Howell, Marcel Dupré and Nicolai Medtner. His concerts take place in the Festival’s principal venue: the beautiful Rittersaal in Husum Castle, on Saturday 14 August 2021.
Having run annually since 1987, the renowned Rarities of Piano Music Festival aims “to draw the public’s attention to works that, despite their high quality, have not found their way into the current piano repertoire”. During the one-week Festival, a selection of the performances are recorded and later released as a live CD on Danish label Danacord. Hiroaki previously featured on Vol. 27 of this disc after his performance of music by Ernest Walker at the 2014 Festival.
Hiroaki has long been a devoted champion of works by lesser-known composers, and has a particular passion for the music of Nicolai Medtner. As well as appearing in his Husum recital programme, Medtner’s music also features in Hiroaki’s latest selection of piano recital programmes.
A full list of Hiroaki’s programme proposals is available on this page, and his two newest programmes are summarised below.
His first programme is framed with piano sonatas by Mozart and Chopin, in between which sit two suites for solo piano. Bach’s French Suite no. 5 consists of seven movements based on eighteenth-century French dance forms, the same forms which were used around 160 years later by Grieg in his Holberg Suite, written to celebrate the 200th birth-anniversary of Danish-Norweigan playwright Ludvig Holberg.
https://hiroakitakenouchi.com/proposal/programme-1-2/
Chopin’s four Ballades occupy the first half of Hiro’s second new programme, a set of works which form a true cornerstone of the solo piano repertoire. Nicolai Medtner’s Sonata-Ballade in F sharp minor opens the second half, before the programme closes with Adolf Schulz-Evler’s florid and virtuosic re-workings of The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss.
https://hiroakitakenouchi.com/proposal/programme-2-2/