Shota Kaya
Piano
Shota KAYA was born in Tokyo, Japan in 2000. He started learning the piano at the age of 3 but he didn’t major in music until entering Tokyo College of Music at the age of 19. He preferred to study various subjects but not only music. Especially mathematics and history made him interested, which is why his musicality is always theoretical and logical in many aspects.
One of his outstanding abilities is a sight-reading skill. It’s obvious from his interview about the 10th Franz Liszt International Piano Competition; he had only 3 months to prepare for the whole program but you know he won the highest prize (2nd prize without 1st) at this competition.
His other remarkable skill is improvisation. And this is an essential skill to understand Liszt’s works. He found it in his young and gradually he started to use to the interpreter of Liszt’s compositions. He never “studied” improvisation but he learned it on his own.
These are indeed based on his background. No one around him had had a musical career or any knowledge until he started the piano and he studied so many things - harmonies, structures of music, tonalities, way to use instruments in orchestra, and so on - by the listening to CDs, reading scores. In addition, at the same time of entering junior high school he joined school orchestra and after that his vision and mind opened to orchestra. This experience is the core for him as a “musician” not a “pianist”.
What matters him is always simple; to follow in the footsteps of predecessors. And through his music, you can hear what composers sought.
CHANEL Pygmalion Days 2023 Artist.
(As of December 2022)
One of his outstanding abilities is a sight-reading skill. It’s obvious from his interview about the 10th Franz Liszt International Piano Competition; he had only 3 months to prepare for the whole program but you know he won the highest prize (2nd prize without 1st) at this competition.
His other remarkable skill is improvisation. And this is an essential skill to understand Liszt’s works. He found it in his young and gradually he started to use to the interpreter of Liszt’s compositions. He never “studied” improvisation but he learned it on his own.
These are indeed based on his background. No one around him had had a musical career or any knowledge until he started the piano and he studied so many things - harmonies, structures of music, tonalities, way to use instruments in orchestra, and so on - by the listening to CDs, reading scores. In addition, at the same time of entering junior high school he joined school orchestra and after that his vision and mind opened to orchestra. This experience is the core for him as a “musician” not a “pianist”.
What matters him is always simple; to follow in the footsteps of predecessors. And through his music, you can hear what composers sought.
CHANEL Pygmalion Days 2023 Artist.
(As of December 2022)