Tokuhide Niimi

About the Composer

Tokuhide Niimi graduated from the Faculty of Technology at Tokyo National University in 1970 and from the Composition Class of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1975. He completed the postgraduate course at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1978.

Niimi won the Grand Prix of Composition at the 8th International Competition of Ballet Music Geneva, and the Citizen’s Award of Geneva in 1977. He was awarded the Special Prize and Incentive Prize for Creative Stage Art at the Fine Arts Festival (1982) and won the Prize for Excellence at the Fine Arts Festival. His music was accepted at IMC (1984), and he won the 18th Nakajima Kenzo Prize (2000) and Bekku Prize (2003). The CD “Fûjin-Raijin” on the Camerata label was selected for the Grand Prix of the Phonogram Section in the Fine Arts Festival (2004). He was awarded the Sagawa Yoshio Music Prize for his symphonic opera, White Bird (2005), and the 55th Otaka Prize for Sinfonia concertante "Elan Vital" (2006).

Tokuhide Niimi has contributed many remarkable works to the orchestral, chamber, piano, and choral music repertoires. He is a present-day romantic, and one of considerable intelligence. His music reflects two worlds, the “melodic wind round” where all is delicacy, elegance, and sensuality, and the “rhythmic wind round” which abounds with constructive, centrifugal energy. His recent creative activity is devoted to effecting a unification of these two worlds.

Notably, Niimi's orchestral works have been performed in Japan by the NHK Symphony Orchestra and others, and around the world by some of the leading orchestras, such as the Suisse Romande, Netherlands Radio, BBC Scottish, Radio France, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Nürunberg Symphony Orchestra, Hamburger Camerata, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, etc. In particular, he is one of the most popular composers in the world of choral music, and his choral works have been constantly performed throughout Japan.

Solo concerts in 2011 and 2013 featured his violin works and chamber pieces respectively. In 2018, he was invited as a featured composer to New York by Music From Japan (MFJ) which featured his Piano Quintett, String Quartet No.2-Asura, and Choral Concerto for mixed choir. Those works deeply impressed both the audience and critics present.

Tokuhide Niimi has been a guest Professor at the Tokyo College of Music and a Professor at the graduate school of Toho Gakuen.

To learn more about Tokuhide Niimi, visit zen-on.co.jp.

Selected Works

Trumpet Sonata -per una selva oscura-, 2012

Etudes for Piano -Questions to Gods- Book 1, 2014

Sonitus Vitalis VI -Somnium- for Violin Solo, 2019

Somunium for Clarinet and Piano, 2021

Soul Dance for Baritone and Piano, 2022