Biography Yu Kosuge

Born in Tokyo in 1983, Yu Kosuge has been giving recitals and performing with orchestras since the age of nine. In 1993, she moved to Europe to pursue studies with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling in Hannover and Salzburg and in recent years has received great support and inspiration from András Schiff.

With her superlative technique, sensitivity of touch (her pianissimo has been likened to ‘the moment when the tip of an angel’s wing touches one’s cheek’) and profound understanding of the music she plays, she has become one of the most noted young pianists in the world and is one of very few artists to establish a highly successful international career without winning a major competition.

Ms. Kosuge gives more than 40 concerts a year and appears at the most important venues in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Zurich, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Washington and New York. Her Carnegie Hall debut recital in November 2005 met with outstanding success with critics praising her ‘acutely poetic sensibility’ and ‘wit, drama, and effulgent lyricism,’ Culturecatch, U.S.A.

As well as regular performances in Asia with the Singapore Symphony and all the major Japanese orchestras, Ms. Kosuge has already worked with many of the leading European orchestras including the NDR Symphony Orchestra Hamburg, NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, Berliner Sinfonie Orchester, Radio-Sinfonie Orchester Frankfurt, St. Petersburg Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Radio Symphony Orchestra Finland, with conductors of the stature of Seiji Ozawa, Rudolf Barschai, Alexander Dmitriev, Gerd Albrecht, Lawrence Foster, Sakari Oramo, Christian Arming, Yutaka Sado, Osmo Vänskä and Dennis Russell Davies.

She is invited to festivals in Rheingau, Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Passau, Braunschweig, Kissingen, at the Salzburger Festspiele, Mozartwoche Salzburg, Holland Music Festival, Piano Festival Lille, La Roque d’Anthéron piano festival and La Folle Journée in Nantes, France.

In addition to her busy concert schedule in Europe, Yu performs regularly in Japan, where her recent tours with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo, Seiji Ozawa and the New Japan Philharmonic inspired rave reviews and great public acclaim. Her popularity is now such that tickets for her May 2007 recital in Kioi Hall sold out so quickly that a second recital was immediately arranged for the same week. Japanese audiences are now looking forward to her tour in February 2008 with Sir Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Yu Kosuge has already released nine CDs. Her disc featuring the Chopin Études, made when she was 16, was accorded a five-star rating by the leading German music criticism magazine. Fono Forum. Since 2003, Yu Kosuge has recorded exclusively on the SONY label. The results of this collaboration are, to date, a recording Liszt’s 12 Études d´exécution transcendante (2003), Chopin’s Préludes and Nocturne (2005), Mozart’s Piano Concertos (2006), Live at Carnegie Hall (2007), and Fantasy (2007) which also met with enthusiastic reviews.

Known for her warm personality and humour, her first book Jõnetsu no Cadenza, recalling the path she took to a career in music as well as humorous incidents from her concert life, was published in Japan in September 2005.

Amongst numerous awards, she has received the 13th Nippon Steel Music Award 2002, the Washington Award 2004 in the USA, the New Generation Prize of the German Radio, and the 17th Idemitsu Music Award 2007.

January 2008