Duo Ykeda - Piano Concert in Fez

On Tuesday, June 5, at 19h, at Hotel Palais Jamai -  another great initiative from the French Institute of Fez; the opportunity to experience the extraordinary music of Duo Ykeda. 

DUO YKEDA has made ​​a specialty of music for piano four hands (piano duet) now devoting their talents to this musical form

Born in 1971 in Japan, Tamayo Ikeda began her musical studies at the age of three years.  She started at Toho Gakuen in Tokyo before being admitted to the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Paris in 1989. She studied under the direction of Jacques Rouvier for piano and Régis Pasquier for chamber music and won two first prizes in these specialties before joining the Postgraduate course in the class of Pascal Devoyon.

French pianist born in Bordeaux in 1970, Patrick Zygmanowski gave his first recital at eleven. He won First Prize in piano and chamber music at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris, he also studied with Jacques Rouvier.  Passionate about chamber music, he won three first prizes at the Concours International de Musique in Paris (1994), FNAPEC (1995) - with clarinettist Florent Héau - Sauguet and Henri (1995).

The coming together of these two talents was a clash of two civilizations. Tamayo Ikeda of Japan had just arrived in France with only a Japanese traditional education, when she met at the Conservatoire de Paris a young boy from a good Bordeaux family, Patrick Zygmanowski. Tamayo was struggling to decipher the social behaviour of the new country and did not speak French while Patrick was handling all these subtleties that help to move in society.

Music was their first language so common, that which Patrick, by his own admission, did not hesitate to use and abuse to cross language and cultural barriers that separated him from Tamayo. This first victory was easier to win than the next. They had indeed a lot of finesse and intercontinental meetings to convince their families of the viability of their union. A legitimate concern of the parents concerned by this great leap into the unknown, they opposed the quiet certainty that they already offered their first attempts at making music together. They were certainly not the same world but, at the piano, they shared the same universe.

Today, almost twenty years later, Patrick and Tamayo are certainly different from each other in the early days of their meeting. Patrick has adopted daily Japanese several rituals. Tamayo now speaks French and  mixes traditional sushi with the gourmet specialties of Bordeaux, but in reality, each has retained its own identity and especially at the piano. Tamayo is the unspeakable, the waking dream, intuition, her instinct always so right that make her an amazing musician that is also mysterious.

More intellectual, Patrick needs to reverse the scores, analyze, explain. He is not content to be a brilliant pianist. He composes, arranges, solves the most complex problems of reductions for four hands or two pianos of large orchestral works he then shares with Tamayo.

For more information, contact the French Institute in Fez

SHARE THIS!