Naida Cole Brings Classical Sense to the World Stage

Accent Magazine

They tell you great art is hard work and they tell you beauty is found in unlikely settings, and maybe you nod in agreement. But, you don't really believe it until you're in Beaumont, Texas on a Thursday night in January with a chilly rain whipping in over the low coastal lakes, and magic happens.

Magic from the mind and fingers of native Canadian Naida Cole, an artist who is fast becoming one of the world's noteworthy classical pianists. Her appearance that night in Texas kicked off a 2005 season that will see her perform in Japan, Germany, Cyprus and throughout North America.

"There were some real music lovers at the concert who came out despite the bad weather, and it was a very warm audience," Cole recalls. "It was a nice experience."

Described by the music press as "a dazzling star" and "an artist to watch," Cole is in the planning stages of a follow-up recording to the roundly praised CD Reflections (Decca, 2002), her second album, which featured interconnected selections from Faure, Charier, Satie, and Ravel.

"I've been drawn to French music recently, and I like contemporary music a lot," she says. "I choose pieces that I fall in love with when I hear them. It's more of an instinctive thing at first. Putting a program together or planning a recording, I try to choose a unifying theme. Ravel was a student of Faure, and admired Chabrier as well. They have a similar kind of vision."

MusicTap.net's Brett Rudolph was one of the reviewers who loved Reflections, and picked up on Cole's reasoning for the way she put the disk together.

"Without her talent as a pianist and a person, none of the reflections that this recording asks you to make would be possible," he wrote. "It take passion and grace, coupled with beauty and artistry, to make all these things come together as well as they did...Naida Cole's skill as a pianist is definitely recognizable by her ability to make the hardest and most complex movements seem as simple and understandable as the easiest of them...I haven't experienced such a synergy of album title, mastery of piano and selection of works in quite a while."

Cole's relationship with Yamaha goes back to her teenage years, when Yamaha Canada executive Stan Zielinski heard her in competition. She became a formally affiliated Yamaha artist two years ago, and owns a Yamaha piano that she brought from Toronto when she moved to New York in 2002. Her West Village apartment is not far from Yamaha Artist Services in Manhattan, and she frequently uses the facility for practice.

"I really like Yamaha pianos for the quality that they maintain," she says. "The company makes excellent instruments. What originally drew me to them was the evenness in the tone; it appealed to me for the colors that I wanted to produce, and I find they're very well voiced."

Like many prominent artists, Cole got involved with music early, playing the violin at age three and the piano when she was five. Born in the U.S., she lived in Saudi Arabia for four years in her early childhood, but says the all- western residential enclave where she and her family resided kept the experience from being too powerful an influence on her. She left there to attend sixth grade at a music school in the U.K., and when her family moved to Canada in 1984, she enrolled in the Royal Conservatory of Music's Associate Diploma program - graduating as the second youngest person ever to have done so, and with top honors.

She holds two bachelor of music degrees (flute and piano) from the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University and a master of music degree from the Universite de Montreal...Among her accomplishments is receiving the Phyllis Jones Tilley Award at the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

One of Cole's most powerful influences has been the latvian violinist and conductor Gidon Kremer. She has appeared at his Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival in Austria, and the two have made many appearances on stage together in the U.S. and Europe. Cole credits him with bringing new elements to her musical development where academic study has left off. "You can have a great teacher that will take you to a certain point, but he's helped me with the hands-on experience," she says.

Indeed, some feel she has outshone Kremer in concert despite his place at the top of the bill - the San Francisco's Chronicle's Joshua Kosman wrote that she "deftly shanghaied a duo recital away" from Kremer, and concluded that she "stole the show." But Cole deflects the notion, and calls Kremer a mentor. "It was very nice of them to write something like that," she says, "but there's never any question who's the star, who's the one with experience."

"It's not something I've tried to cultivate," she says. "I don't mind being asked questions about it as long as it's not getting in the way of people actually listening to the music, and so far I haven't felt that was a problem. In terms of the image I present or the way I dress, I just try to be respectful of the occasion on stage."

Whether she's appearing at the Kennedy center in Washington, Sapporo Symphony Hall in Japan or before a rain-dampened crowd on a cold Texas night, the ear is what Cole aims to please - and the heart. There's every indication she's only just begun.