Akira Nishimura

Born in Osaka on 8 September 1953, died on 7 September 2023; Akira Nishimura was a composer. At the Tokyo University of the Arts he studied composition and music theory up to postgraduate level, while also studying traditional Asian music, religion, aesthetics and cosmology and exploring the principle of heterophony. In 1977 his string quartet “Heterophony” was awarded a prize at the Queen Elisabeth International Composition Competition, in the same year he received the Luigi Dallapiccola Composition Award for “Mutazioni”, and in 1980 “Kecak” was selected at the International Rostrum of Composers. Further honours included three Otaka Prizes (1988, 1992, 1993), the ExxonMobil Music Prize in 2001 and the Suntory Music Award in 2004. He was composer in residence of the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa from 1993 to 1994 and of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra from 1994 to 1997; he taught as a professor at the Tokyo College of Music and was music director of the Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka and of the Kusatsu International Summer Music Academy and Festival. His output comprises orchestral, choral and chamber music, concertos and operas, among them “Asters”, premiered at the New National Theatre Tokyo in 2019. On the audiobook Mirjam Wiesemann: Auf Flügeln in die Tiefe – Geschichten vom Aufwachsen (2010) his prelude “Vision in Flames” for organ is heard.