Akiko Ebi joins the Jury of the 19th Chopin Competition

Japanese pianist Akiko Ebi attended Tokyo University of the Arts before continuing her studies at the Paris Conservatoire. She launched her international career as winner of the Grand Prix in the Marguerite Long and Jacques Thibaud International Competition in Paris (1975). In 1980, she came fifth in the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

She has performed throughout the world, with such ensembles as the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, all the leading Japanese orchestras, and orchestras in Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Argentina, working with such conductors as Frans Brüggen, Stanisław Skrowaczewski, Marek Janowski, Theodor Guschlbauer, Lawrence Foster and Yutaka Sado. In addition to two-piano recitals with Martha Argerich, she has collaborated with such distinguished artists as Ivry Gitlis, Augustin Dumay, Régis Pasquier, Angela Hewitt, Michel Dalberto, the Morauges Quintet, and the Parisii, Manfred and Via Nova quartets.

She appears annually at many prestigious festivals in Europe, Japan and the US, and has performed at ‘Chopin and his Europe’ many times. She has recorded Chopin’s complete etudes, preludes, nocturnes and impromptus and also his E minor Concerto, as well as works by Grieg, Franck, Ravel, Fauré, Webern and others. Made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government, she is also a recipient of Japan’s prestigious Exxon-Mobile Music Prize.

She has been a juror of major international piano competitions, including in Hamamatsu and in Warsaw (Chopin Competition). She is a member of the trust board of the Chopin Society of Japan and committee president of the Yokohama International Piano Competition.