Dai Fujikura

Born in Osaka in 1977 and settled in Britain from the age of fifteen, Dai Fujikura studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin, and had a catalogue of commissions behind him before he was thirty. He writes for the western orchestra as well as for the shamisen, koto and shō. His early reputation was built in the chamber world: Ophelia for solo flute won an international competition for the flautist Catherine Thomas, the chamber opera This Could Be Beautiful? was staged in London, and he took the prize of the Claudio Abbado competition in Vienna. His pieces were heard at Spitalfields and Dartington, at the Barbican, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall, and twice in Sofia — at Musica Nova 2000 and at ppIANISSIMO 2001 — before he turned twenty-five. Between 2002 and 2004 the London Sinfonietta gave him an eighteen-month project under Peter Eötvös. Later came Mina, introduced by the Seattle and Bamberg symphonies; Infinite String, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and the NHK Symphony; Tocar y Luchar for Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar orchestra; and the opera Solaris, co-produced by the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with Lausanne and Lille. He was the Nagoya Philharmonic's first composer-in-residence, and founded the Minabel label in 2013. The Venice Biennale gave him its Silver Lion in 2017, when he also took over the Born Creative Festival at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater and held a residency with the Orchestre national d'Île-de-France; the Nagoya post had begun in 2014. Solaris was first staged in Paris in 2015 and produced anew in Augsburg in 2018, and his third opera, A Dream of Armageddon, opened at the New National Theatre Tokyo in 2020, the year of Akiko's Piano, a fourth piano concerto dedicated to Martha Argerich and premiered by Mami Hagiwara with the Hiroshima Symphony under Tatsuya Shimono on 5 August 2020. The Shamisen Concerto had been introduced at Mostly Mozart in New York in 2019. He became music director of the Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka in October 2024. His fourth opera, The Great Wave, received its Scottish Opera premiere in February 2026.