Aimi Kobayashi

Born in 1995, in Ube. From the age of eight, she was a pupil of Yuko Ninomiya, and she is currently a student of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She made her debut with orchestra in Japan at the age of seven and gave her first recital abroad aged nine. A few years later, she recorded a disc of that recital for EMI and became the youngest artist ever to perform at the Suntory Hall. She has performed in concert with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century under Frans Brüggen and the Moscow Virtuosi with Vladimir Spivakov.
Since an early age, she has been winning prizes in piano competitions. She is a three-time finalist of the Japanese Piano Teachers National Association’s competition. Her recent successes include a prize in the Gina Bachauer Competition for Young Pianists in Salt Lake City and a distinction in the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Competition [Warsaw, 2015]. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Salle Cortot in Paris, Opera City in Tokyo and Cracow Philharmonic, and her concerts have been broadcast by television stations in Japan and around the world. She has also performed live on the NHK in Japan. Her discography includes recordings of music by Chopin, Bach, Beethoven and Schumann