page_title: Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka / Music
caption_attribution_description: English: Kimiko Ishizaka performing at the O.H.M. festival in Holland, 2013.
context_page_description: Kimiko Douglass-Ishizaka is a German Japanese composer, pianist, and former olympic weightlifter and powerlifter who was born in Bonn, Germany.
context_section_description: Douglass-Ishizaka (known as Ishizaka) started playing the piano at age four, was a member of the Ishizaka Trio for 16 years with her brothers and graduated from Hochschule für Musik Köln. As a solo pianist, she has performed concerts throughout Europe, North America and Japan, as well as appearing with the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, the Klassische Philharmonie and the Jackson Symphony Orchestra (Michigan).
  In 1998 Ishizaka was the winner of the Deutscher Musikwettbewerb (German Music Competition), along with her brothers Kiyondo Ishizaka and Danjulo Ishizaka.
  Ishizaka is part of the Open Goldberg Variations, a Kickstarter-funded, and Bösendorfer-sponsored team that recorded Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations and released the score and recordings into the public domain in May, 2012.
  Ishizaka's interpretation is characterised by straightforward musicianship, immaculate technical aplomb, and a warm, beautifully modulated sonority. Counterpoint passes back and forth between the hands in a conversational and judiciously balanced manner, while a strong lyrical impulse informs the cross-handed variations' rapid, bravura passages.
  — Jed Distler, Gramophone Magazine
  In November 2013 Ishizaka and Open Goldberg Project completed another Kickstarter project to fund the recording Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. The new recording was released into the public domain in March, 2015.
  Donald Rosenberg, writing for Gramophone Magazine, writes that "She scales her Bach to the rhythmic, structural and sonic needs of the music, without touching the sustaining pedal."
  James Oestreich, reviewing for The New York Times, reported that Ishizaka is a "gifted and obviously devoted Bachian" and that she "performed the 24 preludes and fugues of Book 1 from memory and without major flaw".
  In April 2015, Ishizaka began another Kickstarter-funded project to record Chopin's 24 préludes on an 1842 Pleyel piano. The recordings were released under a Creative Commons license.
  Ishizaka made her debut as a composer on March 19, 2016, with her performance of Bach's The Art of the Fugue featuring her own completion of the final fugue. In 2017, she then recorded The Art of the Fugue, including her completion, and released it under a Creative Commons license, available for download in audiophile quality from her website.
  On October 1, 2019 Ishizaka released her album New Me! on her own website on the platform Bandcamp.
caption: Kimiko Ishizaka performing at the O.H.M. festival in the Netherlands, 2013.
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