Conductor Joji Hattori - Official Website

Joji Hattori is one of the leading Japanese musicians of his generation and has enjoyed a very varied career as a musician, firstly as a concert violinist, an activity which has developed into directing chamber orchestras, conducting symphony orchestras and finally operas. He has been Associate Conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra since 2004 and during the 2007/08 season served as Principal Resident Conductor of the Opera House in Erfurt, Germany. Joji Hattori is also Music Director of the Tokyo Ensemble, a project-based chamber orchestra he founded in 2001 and Music Director of the open-air Operetta Summer Festival at "Schloss Kittsee" in Austria.

As guest conductor he regularly works with many distinguished orchestras such as the Philharmonia Orchestra London, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Slovakian Philharmonic or the Yomiuri Symphony Orchestra Japan. June 2009 will see his debut at the Vienna State Opera, where he will conduct 3 performances of Mozart’s Magic Flute.

He was born in Japan and spent his childhood in Vienna where regularly attending the opera house and concert halls formed his musical development. Influenced by both cultures, Hattori is today one of the very few musiacians of Asian heritage who is respected internationally for his interpretation of the Viennese Classics.

He started playing the violin at the age of five and studied at the Vienna Academy of Music, followed by further studies with Yehudi Menuhin and Vladimir Spivakov. In 1989 he won the International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in England. After a decade of international activities as a violin soloist, he turned to conducting and in 2002 participated at the inaugural Maazel-Vilar Conductor’s Competition where he was given a major award. Lorin Maazel enabled him to give his conducting debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall and continues to support his career.

His opera debut at the Vienna Kammeroper with Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera was praised unanimously by all major newspapers in Vienna and following a Japan premiere of Leoncavallo’s Zaza at the New National Theatre in Tokyo, he was re-invited to conduct a production there in January 2006, inaugurating the Mozart Anniversary Year at Japan’s first opera house.

Apart from his performing activities, he is President of the International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition and Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London of which he was made an Honorary Member in 2003. He also studied sociology at Oxford University (St.Antony College).

Biography