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Ken Noda (born October 5, 1962) is an American concert pianist, accompanist, vocal coach, and composer. He began composing music and performing as a concert pianist before the age of 11. He has performed with symphony orchestras throughout the world, and has composed numerous and five . He worked as a vocal coach at the Metropolitan Opera from 1991 until retiring from his full time position in July 2019.
He began studying the piano at age five and was admitted into the Juilliard School on a full scholarship at the age of seven. He has studied piano privately with Daniel Barenboim, Adele Marcus, and Sylvia Rabinof. He studied singing with Beverley Peck Johnson, and for many years was her studio accompanist at Juilliard. In 1986 he was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant worth $10,000 ().
In 1980 Noda performed at Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms. In 1982, at the age of 20, he was invited by President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan to perform alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman in the East Room of the White House. The performance was recorded for the PBS television program In Performance at the White House. In 1983 he closed out the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 conducted by Leonard Slatkin. In 1989 he performed in concert with the Emerson String Quartet for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
In 1991 Noda ceased his performance career after becoming disillusioned with the classical musical world and the role he was playing in it. In an interview with The New York Times several years later, Noda stated the following:
Young people like romance stories and war stories and good-and-evil stories and old movies because their emotional life mostly is and should be fantasy. They put that fantasized emotion into their playing, and it is very convincing. I had an amazing capacity for imagining these feelings, and that's part of what talent is. But it dries up, in everyone. That's why so many prodigies have midlife crises in their late teens or early 20s. If our imagination is not replenished with experience, the ability to reproduce these feelings in one's playing gradually diminishes.
After halting his performance career, Noda joined the staff of the Metropolitan Opera as a vocal coach and administrator in 1991 and has since only performed rarely as a soloist. He continues to perform with regularity as an accompanist to singers in recitals in New York City. Performers he has accompanied include, among others:
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