2023–24 Season
Artist in Residence Mitsuko Uchida
In March 2024, Cal Performances welcomes pianist Mitsuko Uchida as Artist in Residence, an engagement that will feature two standout concerts and a variety of campus related activities designed to bring this remarkable artist into close contact with students, campus partners, and other members of the community.
Among the most venerated pianists and thinkers of our time, Uchida is renowned internationally as a peerless interpreter of composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. Musical America’s 2022 Artist of the Year, the multi-Grammy Award winner has enjoyed close relationships over many years with the world’s finest orchestras and conductors.
Uchida’s 2024 residency will feature a return campus engagement with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and a highly anticipated recital where she will team with acclaimed tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s towering Winterreise song cycle. Make your plans now to join Cal Performances in welcoming Mitsuko Uchida as she returns to the Berkeley campus.
“Uchida repeatedly returned to the stage to bow but never to encore; how could she? In her trademark way, every time she faced the audience she looked a bit surprised, then grateful—as if, after sharing all she had, she was the one who should be thanking us.” —The New York Times
Just Added!
Mitsuko Uchida in Conversation with Jeremy Geffen
Mar 19, 7:30pm
Zellerbach Hall
As part of her March residency at Cal Performances, internationally renowned pianist Mitsuko Uchida joins Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen for a conversation about her history with classical music, her unparalleled artistry, and the motivation and inspiration for her residency within the context of the UC Berkeley campus and broader Bay Area. Attendees will have an opportunity to submit questions for consideration in advance. Admission is free and available to the general public with advanced registration.
Beyond the Stage Mitsuko Uchida Artist in Residence 2023–24 Season Feature
Mark Padmore, tenor
Mitsuko Uchida, piano
Schubert’s Winterreise
Mar 17
Hertz Hall
If Schubert’s haunting, visceral Winterreise cycle is the Mount Everest of classical song, who better to scale its heights than two of the world’s most esteemed and empathetic chamber musicians? Renowned Schubertians, tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Mitsuko Uchida together tread a path of existential discovery in Schubert’s setting of Wilhelm Müller’s poems about love and loss, inviting us into the anguished inner world of the poem’s protagonist and bringing to vivid life the barren winter landscape of his solitary wanderings. Reviewing a 2022 performance of this music, the New York Times stated, “It’s difficult to avoid superlatives when writing about Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Padmore.… As a pairing, [they] are wellsprings of wisdom and sensitivity, a truly equal partnership. The performances that result from their deep study of these scores are unpretentious master classes in the art of letting music speak for itself.”
Patron Sponsor: Anonymous
Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Mitsuko Uchida, piano and director
José Maria Blumenschein, concertmaster and leader
Mar 24
Zellerbach Hall
Continuing their highly praised creative partnership, Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra offer another installment in their series highlighting Mozart’s piano concertos. Leading the ensemble from the keyboard, Uchida performs two concertos that reveal the composer’s complex and contrasting sensibilities: in both the Concerto No. 17 in G major and No. 22 in E-flat major, gaiety coexists with melancholy, and the profound tangles with the carefree. The MCO enjoys a well-earned reputation for playing even the most substantial repertoire with the intimacy and subtlety of chamber music—and here also performs the US premiere of a chamber orchestra arrangement of Jörg Widmann’s atmospheric String Quartet No. 2. Together, the artists’ March 2022 concert at Zellerbach Hall was an unforgettable season highlight. “An ideal match—a pianist of impeccable Mozartean credentials and an orchestra of acute sensitivity and musical awareness” (The Guardian).