
PROFILE
About the Artist
©2023 Aiko Kuno solo exhibition "Inner Plants" @ Laugh & Peace Art Gallery
Manaka Matsumoto
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Born in 1993, Manaka Matsumoto is an active violinist and recitalist based in Japan. She has performed in concert halls, city halls, art galleries, coffeehouses and community centers, and has been giving recitals annually at the Hankyu Cultural Foundation’s Magnolia Hall in Osaka, Japan since 2016. Her mission as a classical music instrumentalist is to explore the possibilities of live performance culture, challenging conventions in repertoire, venue, and communication with the audience.
As an arranger, Manaka arranges popular classical pieces to be performed by smaller ensembles in smaller settings. Her signature work is her arrangements for unaccompanied solo violin, shaped by her experience in regularly performing solo concerts in venues with no piano. Her solo violin arrangements cover multiple mediums including ballet (The Nutcracker, Coppélia), opera (The Magic Flute, The Barber of Seville, Hansel and Gretel), orchestral music (Toy Symphony, "Surprise" Symphony), chamber music (Canon), and solo piano (Turkish March, Solfeggietto, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair).
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Manaka also writes and performs her own music. In her recitals, she has premiered original works including Phantasy after “Salome” for violin and piano (2017), Haiku for solo violin (2019) and Dance Suite for Solo Violin “Terpsichore” (2018), which she also performed in June 2018 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Her 2016 piece Perspective – Duet for Violin and Viola was one of the 9 pieces selected for the Boston Microtonal Society’s 3rd Annual Call for Scores, and was premiered at the 2017 Boston Microtonal Society’s concert Modèles – Microtonal Music for Violin and Viola by violinist Gabriela Diaz and violist Wendy Richman. Her first piece for string orchestra, When the Hazelnuts Ripen, was premiered in February 2020 by the American Baroque Orchestra.
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Manaka received her Doctor of Musical Arts in violin performance at Stony Brook University, where she was the recipient of the 2023 Ackerman Prize for Excellence in Graduate Studies in Music Performance. Her instructors included Arnaud Sussmann, Philip Setzer, Jennifer Frautschi and Hagai Shaham. She received her Bachelor of Music at New England Conservatory, where she studied with Paul Biss, and her Master of Music at Yale University, where she studied with Ani Kavafian. As a performer, she has received second prize in the 2014 Dorothy J. Bales Violin Competition, for which she was awarded the loan of a Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume violin for one year.