Ayana Tsuji

Violinist Ayana Tsuji established herself as one of Japan’s most promising young instrumentalists after winning six prizes at the 2016 Montreal International Music Competition. Already a competition veteran by that time (she was just 18), Tsuji was signed soon afterward to the major Warner Classics label. Tsuji was born in Gifu, Japan, in 1997, and grew up in Ogaki. She started playing the violin at age three. Her first teacher was her father, Masahiro Tsuji, who started at the same age and was a student of Shinichi Suzuki, the creator of the Suzuki Method in which Ayana was also trained at the beginning. By age ten, Tsuji was ready to enter the 2008 Osaka International Music Competition, and she was soon a consistent presence on competition programs in Japan and then beyond, taking three prizes at the Joachim International Violin Competition in Hannover, Germany, in 2015, and a second prize a the Seoul International Music Competition the same year. After her Montreal breakthrough, where her prizes included First Prize, the best performance of the compulsory Canadian work, the best semifinal recital, the best performance of a sonata in the semifinal round, the Back Award, and the Paganini Award, concert bookings and recording opportunities began to flow Tsuji’s way. She has performed with orchestras in Japan and beyond, including the Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra, Osaka Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra, Yokohama Sinfonietta, Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, Sejong Soloists (Korea), and Montreal Symphony Orchestra. After recording concertos of French composer Charles-Auguste de Bériot with the Czech Chamber Orchestra Pardubice for Naxos in 2017, Tsuji was signed to Warner Classics and released Live in Montréal, a compilation of her prize-winning competition performances, the following year. As of that time, Tsuji was a student at the Tokyo College of Music, studying with Koichiro Harada and others. ~ James Manheim