Okabe
Akiko

The Japanese pianist Akiko Okabe discovered her passion for new music during her piano studies with Professor James Avery at the Freiburg University of Music. Classically trained at the Toho-Gakuen Academy of Music in Tokyo and winner of several competitions, the artist first studied the compositional work of Mathias Spahlinger, whose seminars she attended until her graduation. After Akiko Okabe completed her soloist studies with honours, she continued her studies with Prof. Stefan Litwin at the Hochschule für Musik Saar, where she was able to deepen her experience with the performance practice of new music. What does a piece want to tell me and what does a composer have to tell us? And how can I convey this to the audience? - These are her fundamental questions when developing and performing her wide-ranging repertoire. This results in very special interpretations that have been highly praised by the international press as "masterly", "full of superior technique and interpretative intelligence", among other things. With openness and curiosity for new things, she has realised numerous world premieres at home and abroad and has worked with important composers of our time such as Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Nicolaus A. Huber, Isabel Mundry, Bernhard Lang, Salvatore Sciarrino, Mathias Spahlinger and others. She has performed at numerous national and international festivals such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Ars Musica Festival in Brussels, Musica Strasbourg, Tage für Neue Musik Zürich, März Musik Berlin, Eclat Festival Stuttgart, Weingartener Tage für Neue Musik, Festival für zeitgenössische Musik pgnm Bremen, Tage für Interpretation und Aufführungspraxis Saarbrücken, Festival Sonorama in Rosario, etc. She has been a member of the Ensemble Aventure Freiburg since 2006. Her artistic work has been documented on numerous CD releases and in radio and television productions. She has been a lecturer at the Freiburg University of Music since 2019.