Profile
HORIGOME Yuzuko(Japan)
Jury Chairperson, Violin Section
Yuzuko Horigome, the first Japanese winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium in 1980, performed the J.S. Bach Solo Sonatas and Partitas at Suntory Hall, Tokyo in November 2020 in celebration of her 40-year career. Ongaku-no-tomo, one of the leading classical music magazines, highly praised this performance, stating that “Horigome’s performance this evening left a lingering sense of profoundness of the spiritual power of sound”.
Yuzuko Horigome began playing the violin at the age of five under the tutelage of Mr. Ryosaku Kubota, and Mr. Toshiya Eto from 1975. Yuzuko graduated from the Toho Gakuen School of Music in 1980, and in the same year became the first Japanese person to win first prize at the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium. Since then, Yuzuko has performed with world-class orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic; as well as with renowned conductors including Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, Sándor Végh, and André Previn.
Yuzuko had also been invited to participate in many internationally well-known festivals such as the Marlboro Music Festival in the United States, the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival directed by Gidon Kremer, the Lugano Argerich Music Festival (Switzerland), and the Flanders Festival (Belgium). Yuzuko moreover dedicates herself to chamber music, having performed with the likes of Rudolf Serkin, Martha Argerich, Jean-Marc Luisada, Gidon Kremer, Mischa Maisky, Nobuko Imai, Antonio Meneses and Charles Neidich.
Yuzuko furthermore devotes herself to holding Master Classes at locales such as Camerata Picena (Italy), Cambridge (UK), Aix-en-Provence (France), Brescia (Italy), and Kada (Wakayama, Japan).
With the desire to help contribute to the restoration in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, Yuzuko directs and performs at the Fukko Concert, a series of charity concerts held annually in Belgium for the disaster victims.
Yuzuko has also been invited to be a jury member of many major international competitions, and since May 2016 has served as the Violin Section Jury Chairperson at the Sendai International Music Competition. In July 2015, her book “Violinist-no-ryobun (Violinists’ Corner)” was published by the Shunjusha Publishing Company. She is currently a professor at the Conservatorium Maastricht.
Yuzuko Horigome plays on a Joseph Guarneri del Gesù, Cremona, 1741.
Official Website: https://yuzukohorigome.com/