Yutaka Sado, Music Director designate of the Tonkünstler Orchestra, begins his collaboration with Austria’s prominent and most important musical institution with 107-year history in September 2015.
A long-time assistant to Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa, Sado was awarded two of the most important of conductor’s prizes: the Premier Grand Prixat the 39th International Conducting Competition in Besançon and the Grand Prix at the first Leonard Bernstein Jerusalem International Conducting Competition. In a joint effort with the late Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra, Sado helped found the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo and served as its Resident Conductor.
Sado has been seen on prestigious concert stages including Vienna’s Musikverein Großersaal, the Philharmonie in Berlin, and London’s Barbican Centre with many of the world’s leading orchestras such as Orchestra de Paris, the Berlin Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, NDR Hamburg, the Staatskapelle Dresden, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Tonhalle-Orchestra Zurich, Orchestre de la Suisse-Romande, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome, RAI Torino Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra.
In opera, Sado led critically acclaimed productions of Le Nozze de Figaro in 2015, Carmen in 2012 and Britten’s Peter Grimes in 2010 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. In Japan, he has conducted sellout performances including Tosca, Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, Cosi Fan Tutte, Die Zauberflöte and Madama Butterfly at the Hyogo Performing Arts Center (HPAC) where he has served as Artistic Director since its inauguration in 2005. HPAC opened as a symbol of the spiritual and cultural rebirth of the region which was devastated by the great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995.
Sado’s discography of over 50 CDs and DVDs includes the recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, and Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies with DSO Berlin, as well as Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des WDR and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with Orchestre de Paris.