NATSUDA Masakazu

Masakazu Natsuda was born in Tokyo in 1968, son of Shoko Natsuda, composer. He studied composition with Masayuki Nagatomi, Teruyuki Noda and Jo Kondo at the faculty and the postgraduate course of the National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo, Japan). Later he studied composition with Gérard Grisey and conducting with Jean-Sébastien Béreau at the Conservatory of Paris where he won "le Premier Prix à l'Unanimité" of composition with top honors. He has received many national and international awards both in composition and in conducting, including the Idemitsu Music Prize and the Akutagawa Composition Prize. He has been commissioned to compose works for the Ensemble InterContemporain, the French Ministry of Culture, the Suntory Music Foundation and other institutions. His music is widely performed in Asia, Europe and North America, at music festivals such as ISCM (Yokohama, Japan), Music Biennale Zagreb (Croatia), MaerzMusik (Berlin), Festival Manca (Nice), Music from Japan (New York), Suntory Summer Featival (Tokyo), Avanti Summer Festival (Porvoo, Finland), Deagu International Music (Korea), Takefu International Music Festival (Japan) and Festival Présences (Paris) by notable orchestras and ensembles such as the Dutch Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Ensemble 2e2m, the Ensemble InterContemporain , the Ensemble Court-Circuit, the Julliard Percussion Ensemble, the Calefax Reed Quintet. Natsuda also contributes to presenting many contemporary works by conducting the Ensemble Contemporary ?, the Ensemble Vivo, the Ensemble Muromachi and other groups. In 2013, he established the Japan-France Association for Contemporary Music with conductor Kanako Abe.
Astration and Gravity Wave for orchestra, Megalithic Waves, Cross-Light, Tableau avec Ré, Fa, La and Convergence for chamber orchestra, West, or Evening Song in Autumn(BIS-CD, Editions Henry Lemoine), Gallop, Falling, Layered Song from Long Ago and Chanson suspendue as chamber music, Deux poèmes de Ryokan and Choral für 12 Stimmen nach Gedichten von Novalis as vocal music, Keichitsu-no-Ne as Japanese instrumental music are known as his major works among many others.