About Isao Nakamura

Isao Nakamura was born in Osaka in 1958. At the age of eight, he made his debut with the traditional Japanese Matsuri drum at a festival in Japan. He studied at the University of the Arts in Tokyo and at the Freiburg University of Music. Numerous concert tours took Isao Nakamura throughout Europe and East Asia, where he appeared as a soloist and chamber musician performing works by John Cage, Heinz Holliger, Toshio Hosokawa, Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachen mann, Hans Ulrich Lehmann, Luigi Nono, Wolfgang Rihm, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among many others.
Isao Nakamura has performed in numerous international festivals and with prominent conductors such as Lothar Zagrosek, Peter Eötvös, Rupert Huber, Steven Sloane, Jonathan Stockhammer, Kazushi Ono, and Ken Takaseki. He has played with the State Orchestra Stuttgart, the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, the Orches tra Sinfonica Nationale della RAI, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of the Bavarian Radio, West German Radio (WDR), Saarland Radio, and the Southwest German Radio (SWR).
In addition to radio productions, he has participated in a large number of recordings (among them an album of works by Toshio Hosokawa), as well as the DVD production of Dieter Schnebel’s Ekstasis. In 1995, he and the Korean pianist Kaya Han founded Duo Konflikt, which presented an album of works dedicated to the duo, and in 2006 he established the Isao Nakamura Percussion Ensemble.
A number of works have been composed for Isao Nakamura by such composers as Toshio Hosokawa, Klaus Huber, Peter Eötvös, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Robert HP Platz, Gerhard Stäbler, Dai Fujikura, Misato Mochizuki, Thomas Lauck, Bernfried Pröve, and Ralph Bernardy.
Nakamura has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, among them the Kranichstein Music Prize in 1986, the Aoyama Music Prize in 1992, and the Saji Keizo Prize in 2004. Isao Nakamura is a Yamaha Artist.
Isao Nakamura was for many years a lecturer at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (1994–2006) and at the Akiyoshidai Inter national Contemporary Music Festival in Japan (1991–1998). He has been a professor at the University of Music in Karlsruhe since 1992, and since 2014 he has taught as a guest professor at the Kyoto City University of Arts.