Anchorage Daily News

Click to enlarge

Marimbist Naoko Takada will perform Saturday night with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra.

Story tools

Comments

E-mail a friend

Print

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Font size : A | A | A

NAOKO TAKADA AND THE ANCHORAGE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday in Atwood Concert Hall at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. The program will include Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," Haydn's Symphony No. 88 and Kevin Puts' Marimba Concerto. Tickets: $20-$42, half-price for students and seniors. (263-2787, centertix.net)

When Naoko Takada was a child, her exasperated parents couldn't take her anywhere.

"I was such a hyper kid, my parents were afraid to take me with them to any concerts, afraid I'd be the wild girl screaming and running during the concert," she said with a giggle, speaking rapidly in her second language. "That's the kind of girl I was, climbing up the trees and falling down all the time."

Thankfully, they gave it a shot anyway.

She remembers that the concert was part of a Girls' Day festival in her native Tokyo, so she was wearing a pink dress and her hair was curled. Predictably, the 8-year-old was running around, but she stopped abruptly when she heard a foreign sound.

From behind the still-closed curtain, marimbist Akiko Suzuki was hammering out "Flight of the Bumblebee."

"Then the curtain opened up. It was just gorgeous," Takada said on the phone from her home in Los Angeles.

"I had no idea marimba was a musical instrument. It looks like dancing, really acrobatic. Her mallets look like butterflies. It attracted me."

Suzuki became Takada's first marimba teacher, and by all accounts the student has become just as acrobatic as her mentor.

A Washington Post reviewer wrote: "Watching Takada play was part of the fun. At times she looked like a practitioner of some as-yet-undefined martial art, wielding two mallets in each hand and then plunging them down, with fierce exactitude, into the instrument's solar plexus.

"At other times she took on the air of an actress, calibrating her hesitations and wearing the mood of the music on her expressive face."

Alaskans can see for themselves on Saturday. Takada will perform with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra as part of its season finale.

At 4 foot 11, Takada said, she has no choice -- she has to be a physical player.

"I'm kinda too short for the instrument, so I guess I'm known as a player who use the body."

FIRST LOVE

By age 11, Takada had debuted with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. But hers was not a predictable child-prodigy path. During several periods in her life, her marimba sat silently under its dust cover as she pursued other interests.

At her middle school, a student conductor needed a piano player. Because Takada had a crush on him, she decided to drop marimba and learn piano. Then in high school, she played drums in a rock band.

"Yeah, I tried to play cool, but I failed," she said with a laugh.

After her grandmother became ill, Takada felt a strong desire to help people and decided to study psychology at Tokyo's Waseda University.

But through an exchange program at California State University Northridge, the marimba found her again. She began to load her schedule with music classes. Finally, she told her parents she wanted to purse a career as a musician.

"They were like, 'What!?' " she said. "They support marimba as a hobby but not really as a job. They were surprised."

When it was time for her to hit the studio, she spent five years adapting classic piano and orchestral works for her 2007 CD, "Marimba Meets the Classics." She said that since so many marimba CDs feature unfamiliar originals, she wanted to give her fans marimba in the context of songs they already know and love.

The track listing reads like Classical Music Appreciation 101: Pachelbel's Canon in D, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Mozart's "Turkish March." She transforms each with her soothing waterfalls of low, warm malleting on the instrument's wooden keys.

"There's 60 minutes in the CD, but I made demo of six CDs with 60 minutes. Then, with producer, I decide OK, these programs work best. I really wanted this to be successful."

MAKING PEOPLE HAPPY

The concerto she's playing in Anchorage is by U.S. composer Kevin Puts, one of Takada's favorites.

"Kevin is wonderful gentlemen," she said. "He's so tall, like two times taller than me, when I met him first time, I got neck ache."

She said that although the first and third movements are the showy, technically gymnastic portions of his Marimba Concerto, she loves playing the second.

"It booms kind of like ocean waves, really romantic," she said. "Mood is like one girl fall in love, about to kiss but decide not to kind of sound. It sounds like melting."

Although she and her marimba have had some rocky times, she's certain now that she chose the right career.

"From the beginning I want to be psychiatrist to meet people and everybody is going to be happier, and I guess that concept stayed in me," she said.

"I love people, and when I get to play for the kids, they are surprised. Their eyes go bigger. In the end, they sometimes dance or mimic me, and that's why I really love it."

Find Sarah Henning online at adn.com/contact/shenning or call 257-4323.

2-Minute Biography:

• In school: The Tokyo native earned a bachelor's degree studying with Karen Ervin-Pershing at California State University Northridge and a master's with Gordon Stout at Ithaca College in New York. She also studied with Nancy Zeltsman at the Boston Conservatory.

• Onstage: She has been a soloist with orchestras from the Houston Symphony to the China National Symphony Orchestra to the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.

• Behind the scenes: Everywhere she travels, she packs at least two pairs of concert shoes with different heel heights. Because she's just 4 foot 11, she has to adjust herself to the heights of different marimbas. She stays in shape by dancing, especially salsa and tango.

• Online: naokotakada.com, myspace.com/naokotakada

ADVERTISEMENT