Ken Hakii started playing the violin at the age of four. He studied violin at Tokyo University of the Arts, and viola at graduate school. He has won the Min-On Chamber Music Competition and the 1st Kirishima Music Festival Grand Prize, and received the Hideo Saito Prize. After serving as a principal player in the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, he studied at the Cologne University of Music in Germany under Rainer Moog and members of the Amadeus String Quartet. Since then, he has served as the principal viola player of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, and has performed in the United States and various countries in Europe as a soloist and chamber musician.
As a soloist, Mr. Hakii has performed with conductors such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Chailly, Marc Albrecht, Zoltán Kocsis, and Sylvain Cambreling; and with his wife, the violinist Hiromi Kikuchi, he has appeared throughout Europe, the United States, and Japan, performing in Salzburg, at the BBC Proms, and in the Paris Autumn, Vienna Contemporary, Lucerne, Milan, Edinburgh, and Budapest Music Festivals, among many others. György Kurtág composed his …concertante… for violin, viola and orchestra for Mr. Hakii and his wife. He has performed with many orchestras, such as the La Scala Orchestra, and the Berlin Konzerthaus, Vienna Radio, Torino RAI, and Hungarian National Symphony Orchestras. For his performance with the La Scala Orchestra he was awarded the Italian Music Critics’ Award “Franco Abbaiti.”
Mr. Kurtag and Ms. Kikuchi recorded Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, which was selected as one of the best Classical CD’s of 2003 by The New York Times, and won the German Critics’ and Dutch Edison Awards.
Mr. Hakii will perform with The Orchestra Now on April 29, 2023.
Bio: April 2023