The daughter of a Japanese pianist and a Swedish architect, Ingrid Fuzjko Hemming grew up with her mother in Japan from the age of five. She was already winning prizes in piano competitions as a schoolgirl, including the NHK Mainichi and the Bunka Radio Broadcasting Company competitions. She returned to Europe at the age of twenty-eight and studied first at the Royal Music Institute in Berlin (today’s University of the Arts) and then in Vienna.
In 1971, she had a sudden attack of fever during a concert and lost her hearing in one ear, which forced her to withdraw to Stockholm for medical treatment. Later she gave a number of concerts in Europe, before returning to Japan in 1995.
She became even more widely renowned after the Japanese state broadcasting company NHK produced a film about her life in February 1999. Also in that year she released a first CD with La Campanella by Franz Liszt, which has sold more than two million copies to date. Numerous other CDs followed, four of them winning Japan’s Golden Disc Award.
Photos: © Fuzjko Hemming, C. Bechstein Japan
