BIOGRAPHY（新）
Hirofumi Yoshida is Music Director of the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Modena "Pavarotti-Freni," Principal Guest Conductor of the Odesa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre in Ukraine, and Artistic Director of the Rising Sun Opera Foundation. Over more than two decades within Italian opera, he has held artistic and music directorships in Mantua, Bologna and Modena, building a career centred on Puccini, Verdi, Mozart and the bel canto repertoire across both opera house and concert hall.
As Music Director of the Teatro Sociale di Mantova, he conducted Verdi's Rigoletto in the very city in which the opera is set. In Bologna he went on to hold three successive posts -- Artistic Director of the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale, Principal Guest Conductor of the opera house, and Principal Conductor of its Philharmonic -- conducting Madama Butterfly, Le nozze di Figaro and La traviata. Since 2022 he has served as Music Director of the Filarmonica del Teatro Comunale di Modena, the post at the centre of his work today.
He made his debut at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in 2007, conducting Pagliacci at the Terme di Caracalla. Engagements since have taken him to the Teatro Verdi di Trieste for Don Pasquale and Falla's La vida breve, to Cagliari for La sonnambula, to Messina for La rondine, and to a shared production of Rigoletto across the theatres of Mantua, Bergamo, Lucca and Sassari, alongside a new production of Tosca at the Teatro di Pisa and Verdi's Requiem in Sassari. Among his collaborators have been the singers Jessica Pratt, Martina Serafin, Nicola Martinucci and Carlo Guelfi, as well as the ballerina Carla Fracci and the dancer Antonio Marquez.
He has returned repeatedly to the Puccini Festival, conducting Turandot, Madama Butterfly and Tosca, and his Puccini repertoire now spans nine works -- Le Villi, Edgar, La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La rondine, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi and Turandot. Verdi forms the other pillar of his repertoire, encompassing La traviata, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, Aida, Don Carlo and the Requiem.
For the 250th-anniversary celebrations of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, he conducted two comic intermezzi by Padre Martini -- Il maestro di musica and Il Don Chisciotte -- recon-structing, editing and preparing the performing scores himself from surviving source ma-terial. That production marked the beginning of a Bologna opera collaboration, supported by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, that has continued for close to a decade -- a pan-demic interruption notwithstanding -- bringing Madama Butterfly, Pagliacci, Turandot, Tosca and Il trovatore to UNESCO World Heritage and historic cultural sites including Kiyomizu-dera, Himeji Castle, the Heijō Palace site, Nagoya Castle and Hōryū-ji. In 2025 he opened a new chapter in this long-running project in Modena, conducting a double bill pairing Mar-tini's Il Don Chisciotte with Falla's El retablo de maese Pedro.
His work beyond Italy has taken him to the Cairo Opera House for Aida and Madama Butterfly, to Hong Kong for Don Carlo, to Paris for a staged La traviata with the Orchestre Lamoureux, and to the Latvian National Opera. Since his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor of the Odesa Opera in 2021, he has sustained his work with the company throughout wartime conditions; in 2025, at his own proposal, he brought the Odesa Opera Orchestra to Japan on tour, serving as Artistic Director and conductor for an initiative covered by both NHK News and NHK WORLD-JAPAN.
His soloist collaborators include the violinists Baiba Skride and Karen Gomyo, the pianists Dmitry Masleev and Louis Lortie, and the cellist Suren Bagratuni. At the Khachaturian In-ternational Music Festival in Yerevan, he conducted the Armenian State Youth Orchestra in Dvořák's Cello Concerto with Bagratuni as soloist, together with Smetana's Vltava and Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World." He has also appeared with I Virtuosi Italiani and the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra, and his performance at the Taobuk Gala in the ancient theatre of Taormina was broadcast on Rai 3.
He served as Artistic Director and conductor for the first full-orchestra concert in Saudi Ara-bia's history, presented by the country's Ministry of Culture and Information. In 2025 he led the Filarmonica di Modena in performances at Expo 2025 Osaka and at Izumi Hall, where the live recording was made for Sinfonie Italiane, released on the Tactus label in 2026. His honours include the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Award (Opera Newcomer Prize) and the En-rico Caruso International Prize; in 2024 he received a Commendation from Japan's Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in recognition of his contribution to music and international cultural exchange.
Yoshida completed his conducting studies at the Tokyo College of Music, including its gradu-ate programme, before continuing his training in Europe with a conducting masterclass at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien and a summer seminar at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. As an overseas trainee of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, he gained production experience at the Bavarian State Opera, the Nationaltheater Mannheim and the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, training under Nello Santi in Naples and under Yuri Temirkanov at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
