About

Credit: Michael Spencer

Pianist Miki Sawada whose performance made The Boston Globe’s list “Best of the Arts 2021: The classical concerts that made me fall in love with live music again,” is known as a fearless musician who is taking classical music where others are not.

Through her signature project Gather Hear Tour, Miki is traveling the country state-by-state with a piano in a van to perform in community gathering spaces instead of concert halls. Miki’s mission is to connect with Americans across socioeconomic and political boundaries through music; Gather Hear attempts to find what unites us as humans in this nation of deep divide. Miki has given more than 60 free concerts in Alaska (2017), West Virginia (2018), Massachusetts (2021), and Utah (2021), very often in rural communities where no live classical music is available.
When not trucking around with her own piano, Miki enjoys a career of solo and chamber music, with a special affinity for contemporary music. Miki has been featured at venues and occasions such as: Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, The Arctic Philharmonic (Norway), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (NYC), Roulette (Brooklyn), MATA Festival (NYC), Toronto Summer Music Festival, Music on Main (Vancouver), Chicago Symphony Center’s Macy’s Day of Music, the Banff Centre, New Music New Haven, PianoFest in the Hamptons, Art Base (Belgium), and Moulin d'Andé (France). She has been featured for live interviews and performances on WQXR (NYC), WFMT (Chicago), KUAC (Fairbanks), West Virginia Public Broadcasting (Charleston), and All Classical Portland (Oregon). In the summers, she teaches and performs as a faculty member of Heifetz Institute in Virginia.

Miki has championed the works of her composer-peers, and numerous solo pieces have been dedicated to and premiered by Miki. Most recently, she has received a 2020 New Music USA Project Grant to commission solo works by composers Ariel Friedman and Elisabet Curbelo. A 2018 New Music USA Project Grant allowed her to commission and record an evening-length work, A Kind of Mirror, by Brendon Randall-Myers. A single release of Phong Tran's solo work "Rotation" dedicated to Miki and available for download. She has been part of NYC's MATA Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival's Contemporary Ensemble, Atlantic Music Festival's Contemporary Ensemble, and has spent multiple sessions at Avaloch Farm Music Institute's residency program working with composers.

As an educator and thinker, Miki finds ways to connect people with the power of classical music off of the stage. Miki was a resident musician and founder of the piano program at Music Haven, an organization that seeks to empower youth by providing mentoring and tuition-free music education to students from underserved communities in New Haven. Miki also founded NewMusic4us, a project through which young and emerging composers write beginner-level chamber music pieces for young students, with the goal of connecting composers and young students so as to re-evaluate our attitudes toward both contemporary music and music education.

Miki received her formal training in solo piano performance. She studied at Yale School of Music (Artist Diploma) with Wei-Yi Yang, Eastman School of Music (Master of Music) with Natalya Antonova and Northwestern University (Bachelor of Music) with James Giles.

Miki is also an ultramarathon runner, currently training for her first 100 mile race. She lives in Boston with her husband Kristopher Tong (Borromeo Quartet) and German Shepherd mix rescue dog named Shakira.

Landing page photo credit: Andrew Rizzardi, taken on the Denali Highway in Alaska

Credit: Chris Jackson