Dubai, UAE
On Thursday 8th February, Dubai Opera will welcome two esteemed soloists to its stage for a classical music concert organised as part of the 2024 InClassica International Music Festival, organised by SAMIT Event Group. Japanese violinist Daishin Kashimoto, First Prize winner at the 1994 Cologne International Violin Competition, 1996 Fritz Kreisler Competition, and 1996 Long-Thibaud International Competition, and Artistic Director of the Le Pont Music Festival, will be joining forces with Italian pianist Enrico Pace, Grammy Award nominee, and winner of the 1989 Utrecht International Franz Liszt Piano Competition, for a duo recital spanning the full spectrum of classical music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 18 in G Major will be the first piece for the evening, before Kashimoto and Pace present Johannes Brahms’s 1879 Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, known as the Regensonate. Next comes a contemporary piece in the form of a joint work emerging as a result of musical collaboration between the renowned pianist, conductor and composer Mikhail Pletnev, and InClassica’s own Composer-in-Residence, Alexey Shor, before the duo bring the concert to a close with Robert Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2, a celebrated 1851 work that was first premiered in October 1853 in Düsseldorf to resounding acclaim, and has gone on to delight audiences worldwide ever since.
Enrico Pace was born in Rimini, Italy. He studied piano with Franco Scala at the Rossini Conservatory, Pesaro, where he graduated in Conducting and Composition too, and later at the Accademia Pianistica “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola, with Lazar Berman and Boris Petrushansky.
Jacques De Tiège was a valued mentor.
Winning the Utrecht International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in 1989 marked the beginning of his international career.
Since then Enrico Pace has toured extensively, performing in cities such as Amsterdam (Concertgebouw), Milan (Sala Verdi and Teatro alla Scala), Rome, Berlin, London (Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre),Paris, Madrid, Munich, Salzburg, Prague, Korea, Japan and various cities in US and South America.
Enrico Pace greatly enjoys chamber music and has played with violinists Liza Ferschtman, Akiko Suwanai, Kristóf Barati, Mihaela Martin, Ragnhild Hemsing and A. Conunova; cellists Frans Helmerson, István Várdai, Alexander Chaushian, Sung-Won Yang, Daniel Müller-Schott, Julian Steckel and clarinetist Sharon Kam. He participates regularly in chamber music festivals and has visited Delft, Moritzburg, Risør, Kuhmo, Stresa, Verbier, Lucerne, Rheingau, Schleswig-Holstein among others. Enrico Pace enjoys a long term partnership with violinist Leonidas Kavakos: with him he recorded the complete Beethoven Sonatas for piano and violin. With violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann he recorded the complete Sonatas for violin and piano by J.S. Bach for Sony Classical. In 2011 the label Piano Classics released his solo recording of Franz Liszt’s Annéees de pèlerinage “Suisse” and “Italie”. With cellist Sun-Won Yang he has recorded works by Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and Liszt. Recently their complete Beethoven Cello and piano music has been released by Decca. He’s teaching regularly at the Imola and Pinerolo Music Academies.
Both as the soloist of international orchestras and as a sought-after chamber musician, Daishin Kashimoto is a regular guest of major concert halls around the globe. The tremendous wealth of experience gained in over 15 years as first concert master of the Berliner Philharmoniker benefits him in his equally adept role as a soloist, where he plays a wide repertoire ranging from classical to new music. Last season, Daishin Kashimoto performed Bruch's Violin Concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fabio Luisi, and appeared with the City of Birmingham Orchestra as well as the NDR Radio Philharmonic. In the summer of 2022, his tour of Japan with the Gürzenich Orchestra under the baton of François-Xavier Roth took him to renowned Japanese concert halls, including Suntory Hall in Tokyo. A highlight of this season is the world premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's new violin concerto Prayer with the Berliner Philharmoniker at the Philharmonie Berlin in March 2023, followed by the Swiss premiere at the KKL Luzern with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra in June. An Asian tour with the City of Birmingham Orchestra is scheduled for the end of the season.
Daishin Kashimoto has appeared with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, the Bavarian, Hessian, and West German Radio Symphony Orchestras, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra under conductors such as Mariss Jansons, Seiji Ozawa, Lorin Maazel, Yehudi Menuhin, Paavo Järvi, Myung-Whun Chung, Daniel Harding, and Philippe Jordan. He can also be heard as a soloist in concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Past engagements include Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante at the Grafenegg Festival and Lucerne Festival, Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, and Tchaikovsky's Sérénade Mélancolique and Valse Scherzo at Berlin's Waldbühne under direction of Andris Nelsons. As a chamber musician Daishin Kashimoto has appeared alongside Martha Argerich, Yuja Wang, Leif Ove Andsnes, Alessio Bax, Emmanuel Pahud, Itamar Golan, Tabea Zimmermann, Yefim Bronfman, Claudio Bohórquez and Konstantin Lifschitz, among others. With Konstantin Lifschitz, he also recorded a highly acclaimed CD of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas in 2014. His other recordings include a CD of Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Myung Whun Chung for Sony Music.
His parents introduced him to various instruments early on, with the three-year-old opting for the violin and receiving his first lessons in Tokyo. After moving to the United States, Daishin Kashimoto was accepted, at the tender age of seven, as the youngest student to ever attend Julliard School's pre-college program; at age eleven, he transferred to the Lübeck University of Music under Zakhar Bron, before becoming a student of Rainer Kussmaul at the Freiburg University of Music from 1999 to 2004. He also had great success in major competitions as a teenager, taking first prize at the Menuhin Junior International Competition in 1993, the Cologne Violin Competition in 1994, and in 1996 at the Vienna Fritz Kreisler and the Long-Thibaud Competitions. Daishin Kashimoto has been the artistic director of the Le Pont Music Festival in Ako and Himeji (Japan) since 2007. He plays on a del Gesu 1744 "de Beriot" kindly loaned by Crystco, Inc. and its chairman Mr. Hikaru Shimura.
