Dai Fujikura

silence seeking solace for soprano and string quartet, re: Sphaera / Frau im Fels by Stephan Balkenhol

Dai Fujikura

Although Dai Fujikura (*1977) was born in Osaka, he has now spent more than 20 years in the UK where he studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin. During the last decade he has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Huddersfield Festival Young Composers Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in UK, Internationaler Wiener Composition Prize, the Paul Hindemith Prize in Austria and Germany respectively and both the OTAKA and Akutagawa awards in 2009.

Dai Fujikura was born in Osaka. He studied composition in England with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin. He is the winner of numerous awards such as the Huddersfield Festival Young Composers Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Award (UK), the International Vienna Composers’ Prize, the Paul Hindemith Prize and the OTAKA and Akutagawa Prizes in 2009.

A quick glance at his list of commissions and performances reveals he is fast becoming a truly international composer. His music is not only performed in the country of his birth or his adopted home, but is now performed in venues as geographically diverse as Caracas and Oslo, Venice and Schleswig-Holstein, Lucerne and Paris.

In his native Japan he has been accorded the special honour of a portrait concert in Suntory Hall in October 2012. In London where he chooses to live with his wife and family, he has now received two BBC Proms commissions, his Double Bass Concerto was recently premiered by the London Sinfonietta and in 2013 the BBC Symphony Orchestra will give the UK premiere of Atom as part of “Total Immersion: Sounds from Japan”.

The French music world too has taken him to its hearts with numerous commissions, culminating in his first opera – an artistic collaboration with Saburo Teshigawara, which will be co-produced by Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Lausanne and Lille. The European premiere of Tocar y Luchar, the world premiere of which was performed in Venezuela by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, was given at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin. His next German commission is Grasping for the Munich Chamber Orchestra which will be premiered in Korea before being brought back to Munich. Switzerland has featured his music at the Lucerne Festival, Austria at the Klangspuren Festival and Norway at the Punkt Festival and a commission in 2013 from the Oslo Sinfonietta.

Conductors with whom he has worked include Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Jonathan Nott, Gustavo Dudamel, the newly-appointed conductor of the Suisse Romande, Kazuki Yamada and Alexander Liebreich. His compositions are increasingly the product of international co-commissions. In 2012/13 the Seattle and Bamberg Symphony will each give continental premieres of Mina for wind and percussion soloists and orchestra and the Asian premiere is currently being negotiated. In 2011/12 the Arditti Quartet performed flare in collaborating venues in London, Edinburgh and Tokyo. His opera, which is based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris will be co-produced in both France and Switzerland.

In 2012 NMC released the first disc devoted exclusively to his music, secret forest, and in summer 2013, another album of his works is planned to be released on the KAIROS label, performed by I.C.E. Dai Fujikura is published by G Ricordi & Co, Munich – part of the Universal Music Publishing Classical.