Akiko Suwanai

Eighteen years old, and already carrying prizes from the Paganini and Queen Elisabeth competitions, Akiko Suwanai won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1990 — the youngest violinist to have done so. Born in Tokyo in 1972, she studied with Toshiya Eto at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, with Dorothy DeLay and Cho-Liang Lin at Juilliard, and with Uwe-Martin Haiberg in Berlin. Her playing life since has balanced the central concertos against twentieth- and twenty-first-century repertoire, with orchestras across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and a Decca discography taking in Bach, Bruch, Sibelius and Walton. In 2012 she founded the International Music Festival NIPPON and has been its artistic director since. She teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts, and plays the Charles Reade Guarneri del Gesù of about 1732, on long-term loan from Ryuji Ueno; earlier she played the 1714 Dolphin Stradivari of the Nippon Music Foundation, for many years Jascha Heifetz’s instrument. Her second prizes at the Paganini and Queen Elisabeth competitions date from 1988 and 1989 respectively. She has recorded the complete Bach sonatas and partitas for Universal and Takemitsu with the NHK Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi, and she gave the premiere of Péter Eötvös's Seven at Lucerne under Pierre Boulez and then at the Proms under Susanna Mälkki, with further Asian premieres of concertos by MacMillan, Salonen and Penderecki. Her festival in Tokyo has introduced commissioned works by Karol Beffa and Dai Fujikura, and she has long partnered Martha Argerich, appearing in her eightieth-birthday celebrations.