Akane Sakai

Nagoya, Tokyo, Brussels: Akane Sakai's training reads as a westward line. She studied at the Toho Gakuen Music High School and School of Music with Midori Miura, continued in Belgium with Evgeny Mogilevsky and Alan Weiss, and later worked with Pavel Gililov and Lilya Zilberstein. As soloist she has appeared with Kremerata Baltica, Sinfonia Varsovia, the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and she also performs chamber music, in repertoire running from the Classical period to the present day. Her early international years were supported by the Japanese Ministry of Culture's young-artist programme. In Belgium she studied at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven, graduating with a first prize, and she also held a scholarship from Japan's Yellow Angel Foundation. She has played at the Philharmonie de Paris, Suntory Hall, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Teatro Colon, appeared with the Hamburger Symphoniker, and worked under Alexander Vedernikov, Jean-Jacques Kantorow and Hubert Soudant. Her recordings are for Deutsche Grammophon, Warner Classics and Avanti Classic, her chamber partners include Martha Argerich, Gidon Kremer and Ivry Gitlis, and since 2018 she has been artistic organiser of the Argerich festival in Hamburg.