Praised by The Times for her “noble playing, with its rhythmic life, taut and rigorous,” Akiko Suwanai is the youngest ever winner of the IX International Tchaikovsky Competition.
Recent performances include concerts with the BBC Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic (Vassily Petrenko), and Danish National Symphony. Highlights of the 2015/16 season include performances with the Philharmonia Orchestra and The Philadelphia Orchestra. Additionally, she will tour Japan with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra (Yuri Temirkanov). She has worked with the London Symphony Orchestra (Valery Gergiev) and Orchestre de Paris (Paavo Järvi).
Ms. Suwanai has won prizes including the International Paganini Competition in Italy and the Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Belgium. She studied at the Toho Gakuen School of Music with Toshiya Eto, at Columbia University and the Juilliard School of Music with Dorothy DeLay and Cho-Liang Lin, and at the Hochschule der Künste with Uwe-Martin Haiberg.
She performs on the Stradivarius ‘Dolphin’ violin from 1714, previously owned by Jascha Heifetz, which has been kindly loaned to her by the Nippon Music Foundation.
