Silvia Molan, Yu Tashiro, Sophia Weidemann, Péter Nagy & Amelie Protscher
Professors, students and guests of the University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart/Germany are playing on our prototype Sirius 6.0, a Yamaha GB 1 with Laukhuff 6.0 keyboard – the first grand piano with 6.0 keyboard at a European University of Music.
Program:
Dmitri Schostakowitsch
Three fantastic Dances op. 5
Silvia Molan
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Frédéric Chopin
Étude op. 25 No. 5 e minor
Yu Tashiro
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Fanny Hensel
June - from the cycle The Year -
Sophia Weidemann
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Franz Liszt
Csardas Obstinée
Péter Nagy
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Amelie Protscher
Invocation
Amelie Protscher
BIOS
The Brazilian pianist and piano pedagogue Silvia Molan is engaged in the Future Initiative Sirius 6.0 of the University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart (Germany) as a co-founder since 2020. As a lecturer for non-major pianists at the University of Catholic Church Music and Musical Education Regensburg and as a piano teacher at the Esslingen School of Music she educates students of different aspirations and all ages. She also serves as a visiting lecturer at the HMDK Stuttgart for “Coaching Sirius 6.0”, providing guidance to pianists experiencing playing-related overload syndromes.
Silvia Molan has been performing as soloist, with orchestra and as chamber musician on stages in Germany, France, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Austria and the USA. She has won more than 30 piano competitions, mostly first prizes and special awards, from early age. Among them, the first prize at the sixth edition of the Brazilian national competition for young soloists “Preludio”.
Silvia Molan started having piano lessons with Regina Damiatti at 7 and during eight years, with Rosa Maria Tolón. She studied Bachelor of Music with Prof. Dr. Eduardo Monteiro at the University of São Paulo, where she also had lessons with Prof. Dr. Luciana Sayure. A scholarship brought her to Paris to study with Rena Shereshevskaya at the École Normale de Musique Alfred Cortot for a year. Afterwards, she obtained a DAAD scholarship to study Master Piano Performance at the Karlsruhe University of Music (Germany), in the class of Prof. Michael Uhde, where she also had lessons with Anna Zassimova and chamber music lessons with Prof. Ralf Gothóni and Prof. Angelika Merkle. 2019-2022 she studied her second Master of Music at the HMDK Stuttgart with Prof. Ulrike Wohlwender (piano pedagogy) and Prof. Dr. Michael Göllner (instrumental pedagogy), supported by a scholarship from Piano Fischer, Stuttgart.
She carries with her significant learning and inspiration also from international festivals and master classes, among others, with Cristina Ortiz, Dina Yoffe, Maria João Pires, Sergio Gallo, Richard Raymond, Guigla Katsarava, Marina Lomazov and Klaus Hellwig.
Take a look at her recital for Stretto 2021 at the public premiere of Sirius 6.0!
Yu Tashiro received his first piano lessons at the age of seven with Anna Zednicek at the Music School of the City of Vienna. He also studied the harpsichord with Susanne Pumhösl. Between 2008 and 2010 he won numerous first prizes at the Austrian youth competition "Prima la Musica" (regional and national) as well as at the Vienna Music School Competition - both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. From 2010 to 2017 he was a student of Makiko Ogawa in Munich.
After graduating from high school in 2016, he studied Bachelor Piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart with Prof. Florian Wiek. In addition, he had fortepiano lessons with Prof. Stefania Neonato. Since October 2019, Yu Tashiro holds a scholarship from the Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Foundation Stuttgart. His pianistic studies were also inspired by master classes with Konrad Elser, Andrzej Jasinski, Andreas Weber and Helmut Deutsch, among others.
Yu Tashiro has performed in Austria (Vienna), Germany (Stuttgart, Bielefeld, Göttingen and Landshut) and Japan (Osaka and Fukuoka). In addition to his piano solo activities, he has a permanent Lied Duo with the Indian baritone Frazan Adil Kotwal since 2018. The duo has already performed at the most diverse venues (prisons, museums) and participated in the 28th Johannes Brahms Competition in Pörtschach am Wörthersee.
Since 2023 Yu Tashiro is supporting the Future Initiative Sirius 6.0 of Prof. Ulrike Wohlwender at the University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart (Germany) as a tutor.
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Sophia Weidemann was born in 1994. She began her musical education at the age of 10. At only 15 years of age, Sophia Weidemann was admitted to the State University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart (Germany) as a precollege student in the class of Prof. Florian Wiek with whom she also studied during her Bachelor and Masters degree. She also took part in the Erasmus program, studying at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna/Austria (2016) under Prof. Jan Jiracek and at the Academy of Music in Riga, Latvia (2019) with Prof. Sergejs Osokins. In the last three years, she studied towards her Concert exam at the State University of Music and of the Performing Arts Stuttgart with Prof. Florian Wiek and Prof. Péter Nagy. Quite recently she passed her studies with distinction playing the Goldberg-Variations written by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Sophia Weidemann has won first prizes in several competitions: the International Béla Bartók Piano Competition in Vienna (2015), the Carl Wending Chamber Music Competition Stuttgart (2018), the International Alexander Scriabin Competition in Paris (2019) and in 2022 she won the first prize in the Virtuoso e Belcanto Festival in Lucca with her chamber music group „Kyklos Chambers“.
Sophia Weidemann received a scholarship from the Lyceum Club, the Helga Drews Foundation and the Richard Wagner Society Stuttgart. She is also a scholarship recipient of Yehudi Menuhin’s ‘live music now’. The goal of this program is to bring music to places and to people who otherwise have no opportunity to attend concerts. Sophia took part in masterclasses with Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner, Ian Fountain, Ralf Gothóni, Vebjörn Anvik, Colin Stone, Adrian Oetiker and Gerhard Schulz.
Nowadays she is publishing her first CD with piano music written by Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) and she will be seen in a documentary about Fanny Hensel made by ARTE channel.
https://www.sophia-weidemann.com/
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Péter Nagy
A first prize in the 1979 Hungarian Radio Competition launched virtuoso pianist Péter Nagy into a remarkable international career. He had begun studying at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and at the age of just eight years old. Péter Nagy has performed in Europe, the USA, Asia and Australia and has given solo recitals in New York, Sydney, New Zealand and throughout Japan. As a soloist and chamber musician, Péter Nagy has performed at major music festivals including those in Aix-en-Provence, Bastad, Blonay, Davos, Divonne, Edinburgh, Eisenach, Fayetteville, Frenswegen, Helsinki, Llandoff, Kilkenny, Kuhmo, Kronberg, Moritzburg, Nelson, Ojai, Oberstdorf, Stresa, West Cork, the Marlboro Music Festival and the international piano festivals in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, China.
Péter Nagy gives regular chamber music performances with partners such as Zoltán Kocsis, László Polgár, Miklós Perényi, Leonidas Kavakos, the St Lawrence String Quartet, Kim Kashkashian, Charles Neidich, Nobuko Imai, Tanja Becker-Bender, Ruggiero Ricci, Frans Helmerson and Claudio Bohórquez.
Péter Nagy is a professor of piano at the State University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart and director of the department for keyboard instruments at the Doctoral School of the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He has released CDs under Hungaroton, Delos, Naxos, SWR/Naxos, BIS, Berlin Classics, Hyperion, Decca and ECM. In 2001, he received the prestigious Liszt Award from the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs.
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Amelie Protscher is a jazz pianist based in Berlin, Germany. Since 1999, she has been actively involved in the Berlin and Hamburg jazz scenes not only as a soloist and sought-after accompanist, but also has made a name for herself as an educator and studio musician who has appeared as a featured performer on some 20 albums spanning the gamut from singer-songwriter folk to jazz fusion. In addition, she has appeared on concert and festival stages all over Europe and served as a juror for numerous national awards in the jazz field.
Inspired by artists such as Charles Mingus and Rahsaan Roland Kirk with their emphasis on bridging the gap between traditional and modern jazz forms, her playing integrates strong blues and gospel roots with modern sensibilities, providing an encyclopedic overview over 120 years of jazz piano history. Her work as an soloist rests largely on two styles that form the heart and soul of her unaccompanied work: the contrapuntal "three-handed" style pioneered by Dave McKenna in the 1950s that juxtaposes independent melody and bass lines with rich middle-voice structures, and the Harlem Stride tradition with its driving left-hand patterns and lush wide-position chords.
Her decades-long involvement with these styles has impelled Protscher to become an advocate for reduced-scale piano keyboards because the left-hand stretches these styles require are virtually impossible to execute comfortably by all but the most large-handed of players. Recorded after only one day of adaptation, this is her first public performance on a narrower keyboard than the customary 6.5"/octave that finds her exploring the new opportunities opened up to pianists with small and average hand spans by the smaller key width of Sirius 6.0 at UMDK Stuttgart.
You are cordially invited to watch two presentations of the Future Intiative Sirius 6.0 of the HMDK Stuttgart (Germany):
Sirius 6.0 - a piano that grows your hands 2021 with Prof. Ulrike Wohlwender, Annette Seiler, Silvia Molan, Sophia Weidemann (8 min) -- subtitles in EN / PT / CN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjFA0Kolq_0
Sirius 6.0 Concert & Get Together 2022 - introductory lecture with Prof. Ulrike Wohlwender (35 min) -- subtitles in EN / CN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwNV3IsNrS0
Further information around Sirius 6.0: https://www.hmdk-stuttgart.de/facilities/sirius-60/?L=1