Iwamoto Mari Explained

Iwamoto Mari
Birth Date:19 January 1926
Death Place:Tokyo
Othername:巖本メリー・エステル → 巖本 真理
Occupation:violinist
Relations:Grandfather: Iwamoto Yoshiharu― Educator for women, Christian. Grandmother:Wakamatsu Shizuko― Educator, translator, and novelist.

Iwamoto Mari (巖本 真理, 19 January 1926―11 May 1979) was a Japanese violinist and educator. She founded the Iwamoto Mari String Quartet and was a professor at the Tokyo Academy of Music.

Biography

Born in Japan to a Japanese father, Masahito Iwamoto, and an American mother, Marguerite (nee Magruder). She took violin lessons from Anna Bubnova-Ono (Anna Dmitrievna Bubnova) after the age of six. She was a child prodigy, winning the All Japan Music Competition's violin category in 1937.

From 1946 to 1949, she was a professor at the Tokyo Academy of Music, resigning the post in 1949 in order to spend a year in the USA. She stayed there in a year and half, and took lessons by George Enescu in Chicago, and Louis Persinger in New York at The Juilliard School.[1] On 14 June 1950, she took a recital at the Town Hall.[2]

She resumed to play a soloist after coming back to Japan.[3] In addition, She founded the Iwamoto Mari String Quartet in 1967, with violinist Tomoda Yoshiaki, viola player Suganuma Junji and cellist Kuranuma Toshio; the quartet won a special prize at the Suntory Music Award in 1979, shortly prior to Mari's death from cancer on 11 May 1979.

References

Notes

  1. https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E5%B7%8C%E6%9C%AC%E7%9C%9F%E7%90%86-%E7%94%9F%E3%81%8D%E3%82%8B%E6%84%8F%E5%91%B3-%E5%B1%B1%E5%8F%A3-%E7%8E%B2%E5%AD%90/dp/4103354038 Her autobiography: YAMAGUCHI Reiko, "IWAMOTO Mari: Meaning of life"
  2. The New York Herald Tribune
  3. She was a favorite female violinist in Japan at that time. On the "Banshun"(Late Spring) filmed by Yasujirō Ozu, Ozu used a scene of her violin recital.

The clip from the Ozu film "Late Spring" can be see here. http://www.otto5.com/_video/Iwamoto_Clip.mp4