Eiji Oue

Before assuming the post at Radio-Philharmonie Hannover as the Chief conductor in 1998, Maestro Oue, a remarkable conductor, was the music director for the Minnesota Orchestra since 1993. A native of Hiroshima, Japan, Oue began piano lessons at the age of four. At fifteen he entered the Toho School of Music as a performance major, beginning his conducting studies that same year with Hideo Saito, who had been the teacher of Seiji Ozawa.

It was at Tanglewood that Oue met Maestro Leonard Bernstein, who became his mentor and colleague, featuring his young protege in concerts around the world and sharing the podium with him at such places as La Scala, the Vienna State Opera and the Opera de Paris-Bastille, as well as Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, Rome and other major musical capitals. Besides studies with his principal teachers, Bernstein and Ozawa, Oue participated in master classes led by Claudio Abbado and Colin Davis.In May 1995, Oue completed his fourth and final season as music director of the Erie Philharmonic.

Before that, he spent four years as associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. During his Buffalo tenure, Oue led Casual Classics and Downtowner series concerts and conducted an annual "Bill at the Phil" concert in which a star member of the Buffalo Bills football team participated. In 1998 Eiji Oue became chief conductor of the NDR Radio Philharmonic.

International appearances have taken him from Paris to St. Petersburg; in North American he has conducted such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. In the spring of 2003 Eiji Oue gave his debut as Musical Director of the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra.

He has worked with most of Germany's major orchestras, and in 2005 he will be conducting "Tristan und Isolde" at the Bayreuth Festival. Since autumn 2000, Eiji Oue has held a professorship at the University of Music and Drama Hanover.