Reiko Fujisawa (piano)
Reiko Fujisawa fuses the sensibilities of a musician raised in the Far East who trained in the West. Following study at the Musashino University of Music in Tokyo and in San Francisco, she moved to the UK, where she trained at Trinity College and with Martino Tirimo, Benjamin Kaplan and Yonty Solomon. She has been in London ever since.
Reiko has established herself as an exciting and formidable virtuoso performer. She made her debut at Southbank Centre in 1999, at the Wigmore Hall in 2003, and performed with the Soloists of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the inaugural season at London’s Cadogan Hall in 2006. She has since made appearances at prestigious venues all over the UK and overseas.
Reiko was a featured artist at the Japan 2001 festival with the specially formed Ensemble Tōzai, which combines western and classical Japanese musicians and repertoires. Her chamber music collaborations also include Principals of Sound, a woodwind and piano ensemble comprising some of the UK’s top wind players, and piano quintets with the Carducci String Quartet. Reiko’s other concerts include appearances at the Stoller Hall in Manchester, the Hebden Bridge Piano Festival, London’s King’s Place, and at Southbank Centre’s refurbished Purcell Room, both as part of the hall’s reopening programme and with “Clara 2019”, a specially devised evening of words and music celebrating the life and work of Clara Wieck Schumann.
Her acclaimed CD of music by Bach, Beethoven and Schubert was released on the Quartz Music label in 2012. In its review, The Arts Desk found the recording “irresistible”. Reiko's latest recording, of Bach’s Goldberg Variations released on Quartz in 2017, received a glowing review from The Record Geijutsu, Japan’s equivalent to The Gramophone, describing it as an “unpretentious, clean and refreshing performance with a refined dignity”.
In the 2023/24 season, Reiko devised and presented Nature & Music, a series of chamber music concerts highlighting the connection between music, the world around us and the environment.
Her latest project is Harmony Beyond Music, exploring themes of equality and diversity, conflict, exclusion and prejudice.