Akira Ifukube - The Artistry of Akira Ifukube, Vol. 5 (Naoto Otomo; Jun'ichi Hirokami)

Information

Composer: Akira Ifukube

• Symphony Concertante for Piano and Orchestra
• Rapsodia concertante per violino ed orchestra

Izumi Tateno, piano

Tsugio Tokunaga, violin

Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra

Naoto Otomo & Jun'ichi Hirokami, conductor

Date: 1997

Label: King Record

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Akira Ifukube (31 May 1914 – 8 February 2006) was a Japanese composer. He studied forestry at Hokkaido University and is a self-taught composer. In 1936 Ifukube's first orchestral work, Japanese Rhapsody (1935), won the Tcherepnin Prize in Paris. After this international success he went on to write several more orchestral and chamber works, and gained a teaching position at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s Ifukube was active as a composer of film and concert music, writing scores for some 300 films. From 1976 to 1987, he was president of the Tokyo College of Music.

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Naoto Otomo, born 1958 in Tokyo, graduated from the Toho Gakuen School of Music and trained at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Among his teachers are Seiji Ozawa, Tadaaki Otaka, André Previn, Leonard Bernstein and Igor Markevitch. Since his debut with the NHK Symphony Orchestra at the age of 22, Otomo has been invited regularly to conduct all the major orchestras both based in Tokyo and all over Japan. He currently serves as Music Director at the Ryukyu Symphony Orchestra (since 2016), and previously held the posts at the Japan Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony, Kyoto Symphony, Osaka Philharmonic and Gunma Symphony.

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Jun'ichi Hirokami (born 5 May 1958 in Tokyo) is a Japanese conductor. He studied viola, piano, conducting and musicology at the Tokyo College of Music, and is the winner of the first Kondrashin International Conducting Competition in Amsterdam in 1984. Hirokami served as Chief Conductor of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 1996, then the Limburg Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2000. From 2008 to 2022 he has achieved a golden era in Kyoto as Chief Conductor as well as Music and Artistic Advisor of the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra. He is a professor of conducting division at Tokyo College of Music.

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