TOSHIO HOSOKAWA - Schott Music

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Toshio Hosokawa
Toshio Hosokawa was born in Hiroshima in 1955. He has been to Germany to study
composition for ten years since 1976, with Isang Yun at the Hochschule der Künste in
Berlin and with Klaus Huber at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg.
In 1980, Hosokawa participated for the first time in the Internationale Ferienkurse für
Neue Musik in Darmstadt. Since then, he has been working on composition mainly in
Europe and Japan, gaining a good reputation worldwide as one of the leading Japanese
composers and being commissioned by the primary orchestras, the major music festivals
and the significant opera theatres in Europe and America one after another.
His second opera HANJO commissioned by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2004 (Anne
Teresa de Keersmaeker, staging), his orchestral work Circulating Ocean, commissioned by
the Salzburg Festival in 2005 (premièred by the Vienna Philharmonic), Woven Dreams, an
award-winning work of the 5th Roche commissions in 2008 (for the Lucerne Festival and
the Carnegie Hall, premièred by Cleaveland Orchestra at the Lucerne Festival in 2010),
his third opera Matsukaze commissioned by La Monnaie in 2011 (Sasha Waltz, staging),
Horn Concerto ―Moment of Blossoming―, co-commissioned by Berliner Philharmoniker,
the Barbican Centre London and Concertgebouw Amsterdam (premièred by the Berliner
Philharmoniker in 2011) and many others were premièred under the baton of the world’s
leading conductor, for example, Kazushi Ono, Valery Gergiev, Franz Welser-Möst, Sir
Simon Rattle and so on. Many of these metioned works have been performed as an
important repertoire in each genre.
In 2001, Hosokawa became a member of Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He was Composerin-Residence
with Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in the 1998-2007 season, with Deutsches
Symphonie Orchester Berlin in the 2006/2007 season and with WDR Rundfunkchor Köln
in the seasons 2006–2008. In 2006/2007 and again in 2008/2009 he was invited as one
of the Fellows by Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2012, he was elected to Bayerische
Akademie der Schönen Künste, München.
Currently, he serves as Music Director for the Takefu International Music Festival, a guest
professor at Tokyo College of Music and at Elisabeth University of Music.
Biography