American pianist Kayo Iwama has concertized extensively with singers such as Stephanie Blythe, Kendra Colton, William Hite, Rufus Müller, Christòpheren Nomura, Lucy Shelton, and Dawn Upshaw throughout North America, Europe and Japan. She has performed in venues including the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall, The Morgan Library, 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 gorgeuos colors”.
Iwama is the associate director of the innovative Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where she works in tandem with the artistic director Stephanie Blythe. In addition she has been invited to give master classes and serve as guest faculty at major institutions in Asia and the United States, including National Taiwan Normal University and the Juilliard School. She has been a faculty member of Songfest, and well as a participant in the Ravinia, Ojai, Token Creek and the Aldeburgh music festivals. For over two decades she taught at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she also served as the coordinator of the Vocal Studies Program. A former resident of the Boston area, she was a frequent performer on WGBH radio, and performed with such groups as the Florestan Recital Project, the Handel and Haydn Society and Emmanuel Music, and served as pianist and music director of the critically acclaimed Cantata Singers Chamber Series. She has also held positions at the Hartt School of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music and the Boston Conservatory.