In 1980, Yuzuko Horigome became the first Japanese musician to win the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition. Marking the 40th anniversary of this achievement in 2020, she gave a solo recital of J.S. Bach’s works for unaccompanied violin at Suntory Hall in Tokyo. Her performance was met with critical acclaim, with Ongaku no Tomo magazine praising it as having “a depth imbued with a spiritual resonance—like ‘sound spirits’—arising not only from the performance itself, but also from the extraordinary atmosphere of the evening.”
Yuzuko Horigome began studying the violin at the age of five with Ryosaku Kubota, and from 1975 she studied under Toshiya Eto, graduating from the Toho Gakuen School of Music in 1980. She has performed with leading orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of distinguished conductors including Claudio Abbado, Seiji Ozawa, and Simon Rattle. Horigome has been invited to major music festivals around the world, including the Marlboro Music Festival, the Lockenhaus Festival, the Lugano Festival, and the Flanders Festival in Belgium. A passionate chamber musician, she has collaborated with artists such as Rudolf Serkin, Martha Argerich, Jean-Marc Luisada, Gidon Kremer, Mischa Maisky, Nobuko Imai, Antonio Meneses, and Charles Neidich. Moved by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she organized “Reconstruction Concerts” in Brussels every year for 10 years, in the hope of offering some small support through music.
In recent years, Horigome was a professor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels in Belgium and at the Conservatorium Maastricht in the Netherlands. She has led masterclasses in Cambridge, UK, Aix-en-Provence, France, and Brescia, Italy. In 2024, she participated in the concert series meets held at Kongōbu-ji Temple on Mount Kōya, organized by the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST). Beginning in 2025, she is involved in the youth development program En’yū no Tsudoi-ba (“A Place of Harmonious Convergence”), co-organized by RCAST and the Forum for Co-Creation of Social Value, which transcends the boundaries of general and arts education.
In Japan, she has spearheaded numerous projects, including Selected Violin Sonatas by Mozart, the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas, and the six-part J.S. Bach/Brahms Project. In the autumn of 2016, she gave a highly praised performance of the complete violin concerti by Mozart in Tokyo with Camerata Salzburg under the direction of Hansjörg Schellenberger. Her extensive discography includes J.S. Bach: Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin for Octavia Records, concertos by Brahms and Bruch, Lalo’s violin concertos with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice, Mozart’s violin concertos with Camerata Salzburg conducted by Sándor Végh, and a collection of Brahms violin sonatas.
Horigome has served on the juries of many international competitions and was appointed chair of the violin jury at the Sendai International Music Competition in May 2016. In July 2015, she published her book: The Domain of the Violinist (Violinist no Ryōbun) from Shunjūsha Publishing.
The CMIM jury is housed at the Ritz-Carlton – Montréal
