Around the Music Festival

Aya Yoshida, a Japanese composer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, was selected for this year’s Zemlinsky Prize. The award is for a young composer founded in 1990 by Mrs. Louise at the University of Cincinnati, USA. The prize money is $ 30,000. The winning work by Yoshida is “Double-face” music for the orchestra of 2016 composition.

Yoshida is 29 years old from Kobe City. After graduating from Toho Gakuen School of Music, Yoshida completed the training process at the Danish Academy of Music. In 2017, Yoshida attracted attention in her first opera “Skyggen＝Shadow”. It was performed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Denmark and Japan.

The composer Alexander von Zemlinsky was an Austrian composer and conductor born in Vienna in 1871. He became the first principal conductor of the newly established Vienna Volksoper in 1906. Later, he served as the conductor of the German National Theater in Prague (1911-1927), afterthen he moved to Berlin where he served as the conductor of the Kroll Opera.

In 1938, with the rise of Nazi Germany, the Jewish Zemlinsky went into exile in the United States, and in 1942 died in Larchmont, Westchester County, New York.

Photo：facebook.com/ayayoshidacomposer/