The Academy Library’s 2016 Summer Concert Series will conclude this Wednesday evening at 7pm with a performance by pianists Jung Mi Lee and Jon Sakata. The concert will feature a selection of orchestral works by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky transcribed by Lee and Sakata for piano four hands, allowing the artists to sit side by side at the keyboard.
Concert and trans-disciplinary artists Lee and Sakata have been featured in cultural capitals of Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, People’s Republic of China, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland. A small sampling of the array of venues and institutions at which they have been featured offers a glimpse into the diverse are(n)as that they are engaged with: Radialsystem V in Berlin, Färgfabriken in Stockholm, the Exhibition Pavilion of the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo, Bagsværd Kirke in Copenhagen, Myyrmäki Kirkko in Vantaa, Gyllensbergsalen – Sandels Cultural Centre in Helsinki, St. Henry’s Ecumenical Art Chapel in Turku, Estonian History Museum in Tallinn; Beijing Central, Shanghai, China National, Wuhan and Xi’an Conservatories; Tsinghua, Tallinn, Porto Alegre, Montreal, Harvard Universities.
Their last appearance at the Class of ’45 Library was for the 40th Anniversary Celebration back in 2011 – Interventions in Memory: Exploring the Interstices between Architecture and Music – which involved a collaboration with architects John Stephen Ellis AIA, Rob Trumbour, Bruce MacNelly, and the Boston-based design collective artforming, transforming Rockefeller Hall through a large-scale installation of scrims, video-projections and live performance of J.S. Bach’s Art of Fugue and Robert Cogan’s Context/memories – Version C (see https://vimeo.com/user9504379 for videos of the event). Their last summer concert series appearance at the Library was an all-Mozart program to celebrate the composer’s 250th anniversary in 2006.
Lee and Sakata have taught at Phillips Exeter Academy since 1996 and 1994, respectively.
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