Naoko Christ-Kato

**Naoko Christ-Kato** is a talented pianist born in 1976 in Yokohama, Japan. She kicked off her studies at the Tokyo College of Music, then headed to Hanover to learn from Prof. Konrad Meister and Lübeck with Prof. Manfred Fock, nailing her Artistic Concert Exam there.

These days, she's all about bringing forgotten gems back to life, like the music of Dutch composer Rosy Wertheim on her latest releases—think *Rosy Wertheim's Wondrous Worlds* and *De Ongenoode Gast*—plus pieces like *In the Forest*. She teams up with soprano Anna Gann in the Gernsheim Duo to spotlight German-Jewish composers' works that history nearly overlooked, and she's a prize winner who's super active in concerts that even fund tree-planting projects around the world.