Naho Bessho is an accomplished pianist of lyrical and delicate sensibility. Soft-spoken and articulate, she spoke in an interview of her career as an artist, her artistic goals, and her feeling about various composers and their music. When she plays for an audience, she says, she tries hard to express the essence of the music that lies behind the score. Rather than focusing on the effect of her performance on her listeners, she endeavors to realize the composer’s intent as he created the music. "Of course, one can never truly know what the composer had in mind, but I keep searching for that sense of the music’s essence."

Born in Japan, Naho Bessho began playing piano when she was five.  At age fifteen she won second prize in a competition in Nagoya, which enabled her to play a piano quintet with select members of Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra.  At age nineteen she won the highest award at the Japan Classical Music Competition. She graduated from Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music with a Master of Music degree. Upon graduating from the college in 1999, she played a piano concerto with Poland’s Cracow Philharmonic. In 2001 she won second prize at the Yangtze International Competition in Osaka, playing the Piano Sonata Number Seven by Prokofiev. Her career in Japan continued with many concerts, both piano solo and chamber music, in Tokyo and Nagoya.

She came to the United States in 2002 and commenced advanced study at Boston University. During the summers of 2004 and 2005 she was a resident, by invitation, of Brandywine Piano Institute of Westchester University, Pennsylvania. In 2006 she graduated from Boston University with the Performance Diploma. Since then she has given many piano recitals in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire, where she resides. Her musical career was influenced by the following teachers: Hideo Sugiura, Yoshiko Yaeguchi, Dina Joffe, Anthony di Bonaventura and Robert Merfeld.
 
We welcome Naho Bessho to her first appearance on the Historical Piano Concerts series.