You are planning to be here in New York for three months, starting in April of 2025. Why are you making this trip, and why do you consider it so important?

When it comes to classical music, it is clear that New York, for me and many other artists, remains an epicenter for the industry, as well as a unique marketplace. It’s true that we often look to other European cities like Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Milan as proving grounds for one’s talent, and also a way to gauge one’s artistic progress, but New York is a slightly different mechanism that is more commercial in nature. I tend to think of European cities as the place where audiences want to see how closely an artist is following the great traditions of composers and their music.In New York, audiences assume you have those traditions firmly in place already, so one has to also reveal new and insightful ways to think about the repertoire, while also establishing a kind of independent voice that makes you not just a musician and artist, but also a brand.

What would you then say is your brand?

In all honesty, I think it is much too soon to tell. Even though I have been studying the piano now for almost fifteen years, that time has been spent learning the instrument along with honing technique, and basically finding out what one needs to know in order to feel as if she is on the road to really mastering the instrument. It’s like I’m a cook learning technique for separating eggs, peeling onions, and making meringue. The road to becoming a chef is still ahead of me, and I won’t be able to claim that title until I have done a lot more cooking.

What I can tell you however is that as I work to develop that brand I want to be known as a musician focused on studying repertoire in such a way that I research as much as possible to find information that has the capacity to influence both my understanding, as well as interpretation. I want to be the type of artist who is making discoveries that help me better connect to a work, while asking as many questions as I can about a composition and all the components that are a part of it. I also want to be known for taking an almost investigative approach to a work that is designed to figure out how best I can use my own abilities to not only do justice to the love and labor of the composer, but to also give an audience a sense of why the work, even if it was written centuries earlier, remains relevant.

Being able to accomplish all of this is going to take a lot more time, a lot more energy, a lot more study, and a lot more living.

You mention the word “study” and we know that you have been working exclusively with Cosmo Buono for the last six years, after you asked him to teach you following your first prize win in the 2019 Bradshaw & Buono International Piano Competition. What led to your decision to study with him, and the hundreds of hours of Zoom lessons you have had with him where you are in Tokyo, and he in New York, over the years?

Actually, I have to credit my parents with this decision, particularly my mother, whose insights into my career have guided me from the very beginning. I ask that you please allow me to take this time to let her and my father know how grateful I am for all of their ongoing support.

Right after winning the Bradshaw & Buono, my mother spoke with Mr. Buono about my desire to have a career and asked him about what it would take. He explained to her the type of approach he had to teaching was to have students learn how to study a work as fully as possible in order to really understand it, but to also have them pair that with solid and informed opinions about the work and how they themselves wanted to interpret it. He told my parents he wanted me to be a thinking artist, and one who did not just play notes, but knew how to really make music.

It was this approach, where from the very beginning I had to take more personal responsibility for what came out of the keyboard, that led to my studying with him. It’s been over six years now, and I honestly feel I have learned so much more about music and myself than I would have if I had just been playing pieces over and over again until I didn’t make any mistakes. This approach to learning, where part of my responsibility is to make the piano “sing” has really made all the difference in how I study as well as how I perform.

With your Carnegie Hall solo recital debut a little over a year away, how are you preparing for that event specifically?

Now that the date is fixed, I am, as you always like to say, Mr. Alexander, working backward from the event itself. I am thinking a lot about programming, but also focusing on ways in which I am growing and developing as a person, and the potential other performances, experiences and even outside influences have to impact that concert. Being in New York for these next three months will allow me to absorb not just the energy of the City itself, but will also allow me to get more of a sense of Carnegie Hall as a launching pad for this next phase of my career. My plan is to attend as many concerts as possible, but continue to discover as much of the City as I can in order to incorporate that into my own perceptions about life in general, and the music in particular. I am also scheduled to give performances here as well, which are in part a strategy for getting me ready for Carnegie. I’m really looking forward to all of it.

In terms of my actual study with Mr. Buono, I also want to take advantage of our being face to face in the same room for lessons, not to mention getting to play with his two amazing cats, Graziella and Tamino!