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Momo Kodama's international upbringing is reflected in her musical choices, particularly marrying the music of France with that of Japan.
Both
Momo and her sister
Mari were born in Osaka, but raised in Europe, where they studied piano with Germaine Mounier at the Paris Conservatoire. When
Momo won the 1991 Munich Competition, she was its youngest winner to date.
Kodama began establishing her concert career with the leading orchestra of Japan: the
NHK Symphony, the
Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, and the
New Japan Philharmonic. She has since appeared with several well-respected European orchestras and conductors, as well as in Israel, Brazil, and the United States.
Kodama's repertoire includes much of the modern French literature for piano. She frequently performs the music of
Messiaen, having been encouraged by Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, who requested that she and
Isabelle Faust premiere
Messiaen's 1933 Fantaisie pour violon et piano, which had never been publically performed.
Kodama commissioned
Toshio Hosokawa to write Stunden Blumen (2008) using the same instrumentation as
Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps. She,
Xavier Phillips,
Carolin Widmann, and
Jörg Widmann performed both at the Lucerne Festival and elsewhere.
Jörg Widmann has also written music for her, as has
Ichiro Nodaira. Other musicians she's performed with include violinists
Christian Tetzlaff and
Renaud Capuçon, cellists
Steven Isserlis and
Rohan de Saram, and her sister,
Mari.
Her first commercial recording was a Debussy program, released in 2002, followed by one of Chopin in 2003. In 2012,
ECM released her recording
La Vallée des Cloches, featuring the music of
Ravel,
Messiaen, and
Takemitsu.