She is a violinist and teacher born in Tokyo, Japan, who began learning to play the instrument when she was still only five years old.
She became a student at Tokyo’s Toho-Gakuen School of Music and entered several competitions which resulted in her winning the National Violin Competition for students and winning a further prize at the NHK Mainichi Shimbun Competition.
She was the recipient of the Spaulding Award which allowed her to move to the United Statesand study at Boston University, eventually graduating with a masters degree. She has also taken studies in chamber music in Switzerland at the Geneva Conservatory and in Italy at Siena’s Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
She has received several awards through her years as a violinist. They have included being made a member of Phi Kappa Lambda, receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Boston University College of Fine Arts and Tanglewood Music Center made her a fellowship student.
In 1969 she became the first woman violinist to be appointed at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and still remains with them today. The same year she and three of the BSO’s violinists established The Festival Quartet which made appearances all over their home state of Massachusetts.
In 1972 she made her debut as a recitalist in New York when she gave a performance at the Carnegie Recital Hall. Aside from her position at the BSO, she has given many solo performances with local orchestras, including an invitation from Arthur Fiedler to perform as a soloist wth the Boston Pops Orchestra.
In 1984 she performed in Japan as the concertmaster in the Women’s Orchestra of Japan’s inaugural concert. The next year she accepted a position with the Saito Kinen Orchestra in Japan and has since appeared at festivals and European tours with them. Also in 1985 she travelled to Illinois, where her husband is on the faculty of the University of Chicago Medical Center, and began performing in Chicago with Music of the Baroque, Mostly Music and several other ensembles. Three years later in 1988 she was in Tanglewood to give a performance with Yo-Yo Ma in a chamber ensemble.
In 1990 she went to Russia and gave performances with the Leningrad Philharmonic and the Novosibirsk Symphony in the celebration of what would have been Tchaikovsky’s 150th birthday. In 1994 she worked with the conductor Masaki Nakata for the fifth time after travelling to Sapporo, Japan.
Appearing on CD, she has performed on Live in Boston by Chris Botti.
In the field of musical education, occasionally teaching the viola as well as the violin, she joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 and is also a faculty member of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and hold the position of Teaching Associatie in Violin at Boston University College of Fine Arts, and at the Preparatory Division of the New England Conservatory. As a guest professor she has taught in Tokyo at Toho-GakuenSchool of Music, where she was once a student, and she has coached chamber ensembles at the Tanglewood Music Center.
She performs here in a BSO rehearsal with Anne-Sophie Mutter…
Sources:
- http://www.bso.org/bso/mods/bios_detail.jsp?id=2100097
- http://www.bu.edu/cfa/music/faculty/mizuno/
- http://www.grandorchestras.com/bostonpops/bpops_orchestra.html
- http://www.saito-kinen.com/e/2008program/sko_mem.shtml
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boston_University_people
- http://berkshireonstage.com/2011/07/05/tanglewood-july-22-26-2011-week-three-a-trio-of-guest-conductors/
- http://www.allmusic.com/artist/ikuko-mizuno-q961608/credits/all