Naho Bessho
Classical pianist in MD
Biography
Naho Bessho is an accomplished pianist of lyrical and delicate tonality. Soft-spoken and articulate, she spoke of her career as an artist, her artistic directions, her feeling about various composers and their music in an interview. When she plays for audience, she says, she tries hard to express the essence of the music that lies behind the score. Instead of just catering to the pleasure of the audience, she wishes to adhere to the essence with which the composer created the music. "Of course, I never truly know what the composer had in mind most of the time. But, I keep searching for that in my attempt to emulate the essence."
Naho Bessho was born in Japan. She began playing piano when she was five, and she won the second prize in a competition in Nagoya when she was 13 years old in a junior high school. This enabled her to play a piano quintet with select members of Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra. At age 19 she won the highest award at the Japan Classical Music Competition in Chubu district. She graduated from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music with a Master of Music degree. In 1999 upon graduating from the college she played a piano concerto with Cracow Philharmonic from Poland. In 2001 she won the 2nd prize at Yangtze-River-Cup International Competition in Osaka by playing Prokofiev Piano Sonata #7. She continued on to give many concerts of piano solos, trios and quintets in Tokyo and Nagoya.
She came to the United States in 2002 and commenced her advanced study at Boston University. Through 2004 to 2005 by invitation she became a summer resident of Brandywine Piano Institute of Westchester University, Pennsylvania. In 2006 she graduated from Boston University with Performance Diploma. Since then she has been giving many piano recitals in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, and her music activity has been in Maryland since 2014. Her music career was influenced by the following list of accomplished teachers: Hideo Sugiura, Yoshiko Yaeguchi, Dina Joffe, Anthony di Bonaventura and Robert Merfeld.