"American collaborative pianist Kayo Iwama has concertized extensively with singers throughout North America, Europe and Japan and has performed in some of the most prestigous venues including the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Tokyo’s Yamaha Hall and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The Washington Post has called her a pianist “with unusual skill and sensitivty to the music and the singer” and the Boston Globe has praised her “virtuoso accompaniment…super-saturated with gorgeous colors”. She was formerly on the faculties of the Hartt School of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music and Boston Conservatory. For the past ten years she has taught at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she is also the coordinator of the opera and vocal studies programs. There she has worked with some of today’s most exciting young singers and collaborative pianists, and assisted Maestros Stefan Asbury, Seiji Ozawa and Robert Spano in major operatic and concert productions. Her teaching has also taken her to some of the foremost universities of the United States to give master classes and performance/demonstrations. A former resident of the Boston area, she was a frequent performer on WGBH radio, and has performed with such groups as the Handel and Haydn Society and Emmanuel Music. In addition she was the pianist and music director of the critically acclaimed Cantata Singers Chamber Series, programs devoted to rarely-heard works of art song and vocal chamber music. This fall she became the Associate Director of the Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory, under the artistic direction of soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Miss Iwama earned a Bachelor of Music degree at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her Master’s at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where she studied with Gilbert Kalish. She also attended the Salzburg Music Festival, the Banff Music Center, the Music Academy of the West and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with such artists as Margo Garrett, Martin Isepp, Graham Johnson, Martin Katz and Erik Werba. She has served previously on the music staffs of the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Miss Iwama can be heard on CD on the Well-Tempered label, with baritone Christópheren Nomura in Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, and on two ISMM discs devoted to French mélodies and the songs of Schumann with tenor Ingul Ivan Oak. She is married to pianist Frank Corliss and has two children."           

-- Kayo