Dai Fujikura

Born in 1977 in Osaka, Japan, Dai Fujikura was fifteen when he moved to the United Kingdom. The recipient of many composition prizes, he has received numerous international co-commissions from the Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival, BBC Proms, Bamberg Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and more. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra since 2014 and held the same post at the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France in 2017-18. Fujikura’s first opera, Solaris, co-commissioned by the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Opéra de Lausanne, and the Opéra de Lille, had its world premiere in Paris in 2015 and has since gained a worldwide reputation. A new production of Solaris was created and performed at the Theatre Augsburg in 2018, and the opera received a subsequent staging in 2020.

In 2017, Fujikura received the Silver Lion Award from the Venice Biennale. In the same year, he was named the Artistic Director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater’s Born Creative Festival.

In 2019, his Shamisen Concerto was premiered at Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center in New York City and there has since been numerous performances of this work by various orchestras.

In 2020, Fujikura premiered his fourth piano concerto, Akiko’s Piano, dedicated to Hiroshima Symphony’s Peace and Music Ambassador, Martha Argerich, and performed as part of their Music for Peace project. His third opera, A Dream of Armageddon, was premiered at the New National Theatre Tokyo in the same year.

His works are recorded by and released mainly on his own label Minabel Records in collaboration with SONY Music and his compositions are published by Ricordi Berlin.