Nodoka Okisawa

Conductor
Nodoka Okisawa has been Chief Conductor of the City of Kyoto Symphony Orchestra since 2023, and her contract has now been extended a further three years until March 2029. In February 2024 she was also named as the first ever Principal Guest Conductor of the Matsumoto Festival by its’ founder, Seiji Ozawa. Her first encounter with the Saito Kinen Orchestra was at the 2022 festival, where she conducted Mozart’s ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ in a production by Laurent Pelly and was immediately invited back.
Nodoka Okisawa is the winner of the prestigious Concours international de jeunes chefs d'orchestre de Besançon 2019, where she was awarded the ‘Grand Prix’, the Orchestra Prize and the Audience Prize. Furthermore, in 2018, she won the Tokyo International Music Competition for Conducting, one of the most important international conducting competitions.
From 2020 to 2022, Nodoka Okisawa held a scholarship at the Karajan-Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker and was also assistant to Kirill Petrenko. In addition to her own concert projects together with the academy members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, she also conducted the Solidarity Concert for Ukraine in March 2022 with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker at the invitation of the Federal President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Another highlight was the joint anniversary concert with Kirill Petrenko to mark the 50th anniversary of the Karajan-Akademie in May 2022.
In the 2023/24 season, Nodoka Okisawa made her debut with the Kammerorchester Basel, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Québec and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. She also returned once again to the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and the Münchener Symphoniker, where she was Artist in Residence during the 2022/23 season. In June 2024, she made her subscription debut with the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo and in May 2025, she will make her debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
She is a regular guest with leading orchestras in Japan, including the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.
Okisawa has attended numerous masterclasses, including with Neeme, Paavo Järvi, and Kurt Masur. In 2019, she was selected for the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy in Tokyo. She has gained further experience in the past as assistant conductor of the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa, as well as with opera productions in Japan and Europe. In November 2020, she conducted a production of Lehár's ‘The Merry Widow’ at the Tokyo Nikikai Opera Theatre, where she will return in February 2025 with a production of ‘Carmen’.
In 2023, Nodoka Okisawa was awarded the ‘Hideo Saito Memorial Fund Award’ by the Sony Music Foundation.
Born in Aomori, Japan, she learned to play the piano, cello, and oboe from an early age. She studied conducting at the Tokyo University of the Arts with Ken Takaseki and Tadaaki Otaka and graduated with a master’s degree.
In 2019, she obtained her second master’s degree at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin under Christian Ehwald and Hans-Dieter Baum. Nodoka Okisawa now lives in Berlin.