Akiko Miyazawa

- Violinist -

Akiko Miyazawa is the artistic director of Cygnus Arioso and a member of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. She was born in Japan and began studying the violin at age three. She completed her Bachelor and Master of Music at the Kyoto City University of Arts, winning the faculty award in 2007. She studied violin with Midori Kugota and chamber music with Noboru Kamimura and Kyoko Shikata. During this time, she performed regularly with the Hyogo PAC Orchestra, the Kyoto Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, and the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra. She was invited to give solo performances at the Izumi Hall, Osaka and the Kirishima International Music Festival in Kagoshima. During her Masters, Akiko undertook an exchange year to Germany to study with the leading Polish Violinist Magdalena Rezler at the Freiburg Hochschule für Musik. After finishing her studies in Kyoto, she returned once more to Freiburg, where she completed a Diploma of Advanced Studies with assistance from the Scholarship of Baden-Württemberg. She also held a practicum position in the first violin section of the Philharmonisches Orchester Stadttheater Freiburg. In 2011, she then took up a second violin contract with the Deutsches Nationaltheater, Staatskapelle in Weimar.

Lachlan Skipworth

- Composer -

Hailed by The Australian as possessing a “rare gift as a melodist” and by Limelight as expressing “both exquisite delicacy and tremendous power”, Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth writes across the mediums of orchestral, chamber, vocal and experimental music. His vivid musical language is coloured by three years spent in Japan where his immersion in the study of the shakuhachi bamboo flute inevitably became a part of his muse. This is immediately evident in Skipworth’s major orchestral work of 2018, Breath of Thunder, for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Japanese drumming group Taikoz, and shakuhachi grand master Riley Lee. However it was winning the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for orchestral composition two years earlier which truly established Skipworth’s reputation, leading to a string of major commissions and Skipworth’s appointment as composer-in-residence with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Other recent highlights include the premiere of Hymns in Reverie for the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus at Tokyo’s Dai-Ichi Seimei Hall, and the Australian tour of his Oboe Quartet with Diana Doherty and the Streeton Trio for Musica Viva. Skipworth is the co-founder of two of Perth’s premiere ensembles, Intercurrent and Cygnus Arioso. His two CDs are available for purchase and on streaming services.