Pictures in Motion

Taichi Fukumura is the Music Director of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra (ISO) and the current Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra appointed by Franz Welser-Möst. A rising Japanese American conductor acclaimed for his dynamic stage presence and musical finesse, Fukumura is the Second Prize Winner of The Mahler Competition 2023, and a four-time recipient of the Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Award.

Recent and upcoming international engagements include guest conducting debuts with the Bamberg Symphony and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony. Fukumura will lead concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra this season as part of his new position, including a collaboration with Itzhak Perlman on tour in Miami. He also returned to the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra as guest conductor, where he previously conducted over 110 concerts as an Assistant Conductor appointed by Robert Spano. Other recent guest debuts include the Utah Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Chicago Philharmonic, Eugene Symphony, Delaware Symphony, and Colorado Springs Philharmonic.

As the Music Director of the Illinois Symphony, Fukumura has led an ongoing initiative to broaden the repertoire of the orchestra. Focusing on well-balanced, impactful programming, he has highlighted the work of living composers including Brian Raphael Nabors, Christopher Theofanidis, Stacy Garrop, and Gala Flagello. The 2025/26 season includes the world premiere of a new work by Michelle Isaac, commissioned by the ISO.

Fukumura served as the Assistant Conductor of the Chicago Sinfonietta where he previously received mentorship from Music Director Mei-Ann Chen as a Freeman Conducting Fellow. He also returned to the Aspen Music Festival as guest assistant conductor following a summer as a conducting fellow and was invited by Barbara Hannigan to assist at the Munich Philharmonic and the Musikkollegium Winterthur in Switzerland.

Born in Tokyo, Taichi Fukumura spent his childhood in Boston and began music studies at age three on the violin. He holds a Bachelor of Music in violin performance from Boston University, and both Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in orchestral conducting from Northwestern University under the mentorship of Victor Yampolsky. He is a recipient of the Concert Artists Guild Richard S. Weinert Award. Fukumura is fluent in both English and Japanese.

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists, praised by The New York Times as “a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs.” Renowned for his vivid imagination, depth, and wit, Denk is also a New York Times bestselling author, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Avery Fisher Prize, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In the 2025/26 season, Denk tours widely across North America with performances in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Seattle, Berkeley, and Austin, among others. In recital he continues to explore female composers from the past to the present, as well as the complete Bach Partitas. He also returns to the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to perform Beethoven 1 at the 92nd Y in New York, and reunites with his long-time collaborator, Joshua Bell, for performances at the Hollywood Bowl and the Ravinia Festival. Further afield, he embarks on a tour of South Korea with violist, Richard O’Neill, and performs at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in New Zealand in multiple concerts, including a performance of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin with tenor Colin Ainsworth.

Denk has performed frequently at Carnegie Hall, and in recent years has worked with such orchestras as Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony. Recent highlights also include premiering a new concerto written for him by Anna Clyne, co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony led by Fabio Luisi, the City of Birmingham Symphony led by Kazuki Yamada, and the New Jersey Symphony led by Markus Stenz. Further highlights include performances of John Adams’ Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Cleveland Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, and Seattle Symphony.

Denk is also celebrated for his original and insightful writing on music, which Alex Ross praises for its “arresting sensitivity and wit.” His New York Times Bestselling memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine was published to universal acclaim by Random House in 2022. He also wrote the libretto for a comic opera presented by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Festival, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

Denk is known for his interpretations of the music of American visionary Charles Ives, and in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, Nonesuch Records released a collection of his Ives recordings in 2024. His album of Mozart piano concertos, released in 2021 on Nonesuch Records, was deemed “urgent and essential” by BBC Radio 3. His recording of the Goldberg Variations for Nonesuch Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts, and his recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 111 paired with Ligeti’s Études was named one of the best discs of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, and the Washington Post, while his account of the Beethoven sonata was selected by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library as the best available version recorded on modern piano.