Ray Ushikubo
About this Artist
Known for his “disciplined focus and clarity…and marvelous dynamic nuance” (Arts Knoxville), Ray Ushikubo is a 22-year-old Japanese American pianist and violinist who has performed on the stages of Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall and appeared on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Ushikubo made his orchestral debut at age 10 with the Young Musicians Foundation Orchestra in Los Angeles’ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 alongside conductor Teddy Abrams. A recipient of the prestigious Davidson Fellow Laureate Award in 2014, Ushikubo was named a Young Steinway Artist and won the 2017 Hilton Head International Piano Competition as well as the 2016 Piano Concerto Competition at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Ushikubo was featured as a Young Artist-in-Residence of the national radio broadcast Performance Today with host Fred Child, and he has been featured on NPR’s From the Top, where he was named a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist.
Ushikubo has collaborated with pianist Lang Lang in Orange County’s Segerstrom Concert Hall and with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet on Radio France. He has performed as violin soloist in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s 2014 Strad Fest Gala; Vivaldi’s Four Seasons alongside violinists Martin Chalifour, Philippe Quint, and Cho-Liang Lin; and the opening concert of the 2017 La Jolla Music Society SummerFest with violinist Chee-Yun Kim. He performed as piano soloist at the Los Angeles Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC) for a peace ceremony memorializing victims of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima; the ceremony also featured the acclaimed singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. He has appeared as a guest artist on Rob Kapilow’s What Makes It Great? at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, on San Diego’s Mainly Mozart Festival series Mozart & the Mind, and at the Griffith Observatory as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Immortal Beethoven festuval, performing Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.
Ushikubo received his bachelor’s degrees at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied piano with Gary Graffman and Robert McDonald and violin with Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pamela Frank. Currently, Ushikubo is pursuing Master of Music degrees at the Colburn Conservatory of Music, where he studies piano with Fabio Bidini and violin with Robert Lipsett.