Ai Ichihara was born in Yokohama in 1980, first studying the piano. She started her vocal training in 1996 and from April 1999 to March 2003 studied at the Tokyo State University for Music and Performing Arts. After completing her studies there she went on to the Munich Music and Theatre Hochschule. She worked with Frieder Lang, Edith Wiens and Helmut Deutsch with master-classes on a scholarship from the Meiji Yasuda Cultural Foundation of the Japanese Ministry of Culture. Already as a student she had taken first prize in the Competition for Young Musicians in Japan and the Kamakura City Music Competition. She was also awarded the Mayor’s Prize, the Kamakura Cultural Promotion Prize and Japanese University distinctions. In November 1999 she appeared at the Japanese National Theatre with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a concert celebrating the tenth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Akihito, transmitted live throughout the country. In March 2001 she sang Papagena in Die Zauberflöte. She has since appeared at the Prince Regent Theatre in Munich, the Margrave’s Opera House at Bayreuth and in the Karlsruhe Handel Festival.

Discography