Hiroko Ishimoto

Born in Sapporo, Japan, Hiroko Ishimoto studied at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, where she went on to lecture, and The Juilliard School in New York where her professor was György Sándor, the great Hungarian-American pianist and leading pupil of Béla Bartók. Highly acclaimed by The New York Times and Japanese magazine The World of Music, Ishimoto also devotes time to her piano students, and currently resides in Budapest.

The Cultural Ministry of Japan invited Ishimoto to perform at concerts for children affected by the Fukushima tsunami from 2011 to 2015, and she is an active member of the Women’s Action Network (WAN) in Japan. Her series of essays and performances on YouTube of Women Composers in the Shadows of Men has garnered worldwide attention, and she gave Japanese concert tours of these works organised by WAN in 2017 and 2018. She regularly gives performances of this project in Hungary and Japan.

Ishimoto has released two albums in Japan, My Favorites and Hungary and Beyond. Japanese radio station NHK FM broadcast Hiroko’s performance of works by Amy Beach nationwide on 1 January 2017. She has been interviewed in major Japanese newspapers the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Asahi Shimbun.