Nobuko Imai

Nobuko Imai rose to prominence as a viola soloist early in the 1990s. She completed initial training at Tokyo’s Toho Gakuen Music School, then advanced her studies at Yale University and the Juilliard School. After finishing at Juilliard she captured first prizes at both the Munich and Geneva international competitions.

Formerly a member of the Vermeer Quartet, whose incisive readings of Mozart and Beethoven chamber works earned wide regard, she now divides her schedule between solo appearances with major orchestras—the English Chamber Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra—and teaching posts in Europe and Japan. She returns frequently to Japan to serve as artistic adviser of Casals Hall in Tokyo and maintains an active chamber-music calendar alongside Gidon Kremer, Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Itzhak Perlman, András Schiff, and the late Isaac Stern.

Her recorded output surpasses forty discs on BIS, Chandos, EMI, Hyperion, and Philips. In 1996 she received Japan’s foremost musical honor, the Suntory Hall Prize. Imai is noted for imaginative adaptations that recast classical cello literature for viola; even as a student, during an intensive examination of Bach aimed at recovering the composer’s original practices, she suggested that string players employ Baroque bows with their modern instruments. The same curiosity informs her work in contemporary music. An eager champion of new scores, she collaborated with Toru Takemitsu, who wrote a viola piece expressly for her that highlights the instrument’s singular timbres. Her BIS anthology of twentieth-century viola-and-piano works, which includes the Takemitsu composition, became a commercial success in Japan despite the usual limited market for such repertoire. She has also given premieres of pieces by George Benjamin, Duncan McTier, and David Horne.

Cultural exchange projects form another strand of her career. In 2000 she conceived and helped realize a concert series presented at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and in Tokyo that juxtaposed Japanese and Dutch early and contemporary music, marking more than four centuries of relations between the two countries. That year she also founded the East West Baroque Academy to give young performers practical experience in historically informed performance. In 2008 she established the Michelangelo Quartet, and in 2009 she launched the Tokyo International Viola Competition.