Takanori Sorai

Takanori Sorai’s conducting career spans from orchestral repertoire to chamber music and he currently serves as the conductor for Yokohama Philharmonic Orchestra in Japan for which he also served as a principal concertmaster for 17 years from 2005 to 2022. In 2024, Sorai won the gold prize of conducting at Berlioz International Music Competition 2024 Season 4. In 2025, he won the second prize of IMC international conducting challenge. Sorai played a piano solo of Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no.1 at the age of 18 with his school orchestra and he had studied piano and violin performance and music theory at the Japan office of Roosevelt University in Chicago, USA. The faculty includes Kazuro Oi, the pianist. After he joined Chicago Music College, currently known as a division of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago, he continued to study the music theory and also the violin performance with Prof. Cyrus Forough. Currently Sorai is under the faculty of conducting at Tokyo College of Music in Tokyo, Japan and studying with Maestro Hiroshi Ishizaka, the conductor who also taught at Freiburg Conservatory of Music and Basel Academy of Music. Also Sorai is mentored by the renowned conductor, Maestro Junichi Hirokami through the conducting master class at Tokyo College of Music.