Dai Fujikura

Saturday October 7th 2017

Teatro alle Tese - 8:00 pm

The Silver Lion award for innovation in music has been awarded to Dai Fujikura.

Dai Fujikura is a Japanese composer currently living in Great Britain, who has distinguished himself in recent years for his vast catalogue of works which reveal a remarkable capacity for merging cultures as distant as his native Oriental culture and his acquired Western culture.

His works reveal a sense of form that belongs more generally to masters of more advanced generations, and an ingenuity so rare in discovering original solutions for using an instrument, whether it be a solo instrument or a full orchestra, that he must be considered no longer a promise, but an accomplished and significant reality of the music of our time.

Dai Fujikura (Osaka, 1977) – Born in Osaka, Dai Fujikura has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, where he studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin. Over the past ten years, he has won many awards, including the Huddersfield Festival Young Composers Award, the Royal Philharmonic Society prize, the International Composition award in Vienna and the Paul Hindemith prize, the Otaka and Akutagawa prizes.

His music has been performed not only in his native and adopted countries, but in places as geographically distant as Caracas and Oslo, Venice and Schleswig-Holstein, Lucerne and Paris. In London, he received two commissions from BBC Proms; his Double Bass Concerto was performed as a world premiere with the London Sinfonietta and in 2013 the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed the world premiere of Atom. Many works have been commissioned to him from France as well, including his first lyric opera – an artistic collaboration with Saburo Teshigawara co-produced by the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Lausanne and Lille. In Germany Tocar y luchar, which had its world premiere performance in Venezuela with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simòn Bolìvar Youth Orchestra, premiered in Europe at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin. A later commission from Germany, Grasping, for the Münchener Kammerorchester, had its world premiere performance in Korea before returning to Munich. In Switzerland, his music has been featured at the Lucerne Festival, in Austria at the Salzburg Festival, and in Norway at the Punkt Festival. In 2013, he received a commission from the Oslo Sinfonietta.

He has worked with many conductors including Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Jonathan Nott, Gustavo Dudamel, Kazuki Yamada and Alexander Liebreich. He has also worked with the experimental scene of pop improvisation and experimental jazz, with Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Jan Bang.

The first album dedicated entirely to his music, Secret Forest, was released by NMC in 2012 and in 2013 Commons released Mirrors with four of his works for orchestra; Kairos included several of his chamber compositions with electronics in the album Ice. The Minabel label, founded by Fujikura himself, has produced 6 album-portraits, 2 of which were produced in collaboration with Sony Japan.

Dai Fujikura's music is published by G. Ricordi & Co, Berlin – a division of Universal Music Publishing Classical.