Sayaka Shoji

Sayaka Shoji (庄司 紗矢香^?, Shōji Sayaka, born 30 January 1983) is a Japanese classical violinist. She was the first Japanese and youngest winner at the Paganini Competition in Genoa in 1999.

Shoji was born in Tokyo into an artistic family (her mother is a painter; her grandmother, a poet) and spent her early childhood in Siena, Italy. When she was 5 years old her family moved back to Japan, where she started studying the violin. At the age of 15 she moved to Germany to study at Hochschule für Musik Köln under Zakhar Bron and graduated in 2004. Her other teachers have included Saschko Gawriloff, Uto Ughi and Shlomo Mintz.

In 1997, she made her debut at Lucerne Festival and Musikverein in Vienna with Rudolf Baumgartner. Two years later, she took the First Prize at the 1999 Paganini Competition. Zubin Mehta has been her strong supporter. When Shoji auditioned for him in 2000, he immediately changed his schedule in order to make her first recording with the Israel Philharmonic possible in the following month, then invited her to perform with Bavarian State Opera and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Since then many prominent orchestras have invited Shoji, including the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and WDR Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Lorin Maazel, Yuri Temirkanov, Myung-whun Chung and Semyon Bychkov.

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