Further success for HfMT conducting class

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Yu Sugimoto, a master's student from Prof. Ulrich Windfuhr's conducting class, has reached the final round of the Besançon International Music Festival

Founded in 1948, the International Music Festival in the northern French city of Besançon (“Festival de musique de Besançon Franche-Comté”) is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious classical music festivals. The competition named after him, featuring up to 270 participating musicians, is held annually for two weeks in mid-September. The competition has helped many famous conductors launch their careers and achieve success, including Gerd Albrecht, Seiji Ozawa, Michel Plasson, Zdenek Macal, Jiri Kout, Jesus Lopez Cobos, and Sylvain Cambreling.

Biography
Yu Sugimoto, born in 1990 in Kyoto, Japan, initially performed as a pianist at various concerts in Japan and Europe (Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Italy, among others) and received awards in numerous competitions. From March 2012 to June 2015, he studied piano and chamber music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) under Prof. Avedis Kouyoumdjian. Since October 2015, he has been a conducting student at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama under Prof. Ulrich Windfuhr and David de Villiers. In Japan, he conducted Humperdinck’s opera *Hansel and Gretel* with the Seiji Ozawa Academy Orchestra at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, and subsequently conducted operas such as *The Magic Flute*, *La clemenza di Tito*, “Rigoletto,” “Eugene Onegin,” “Altina,” “Oreste,” “The Emperor of Atlantis” (by Ulmann), etc. To date, he has conducted the Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra, the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra (in Japan), the Dresden State Operetta, the Symphonic Orchestra of the Detmold State Theater, the Baden-Baden Philharmonic, the Thuringian Symphony Orchestra Saalfeld-Rudolstadt, the Halle State Orchestra, the Münster Symphony Orchestra, the Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese (in Italy). As part of his conducting studies, he regularly collaborates with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony Orchestra of the Hamburg University of Music and Performing Arts (HFMT). He was a semifinalist (among the top 6 out of 270 participants) in the 2019 Besançon Conducting Competition. In 2012 and 2013, he also received a scholarship from the Rohm Music Foundation upon the recommendation of Seiji Ozawa and Yuji Yuasa. From 2016 to 2018, he was supported by the Conductors’ Forum of the German Music Council.