Yutaka Sado

Yutaka Sado (佐渡 裕, Sado Yutaka?, born 13 May 1961 in Kyoto) is a Japanese conductor.

While still in school, Yutaka Sado obtained a position in the Kansai Nikikai, a Japanese school of opera, where he had the opportunity to work with the New Japan Philharmonic and the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra, learning operatic repertoire. In 1987, he traveled to the United States to attend the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he studied with Seiji Ozawa. Later he won the Davidoff Special Prize for a competition in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. He returned to Japan as an assistant to Ozawa and made his debut with the New Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo with a Haydn symphony series. He later studied with Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and Leonard Bernstein, with whom he toured the Soviet Union and Germany.

Sado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time on May 22, 2011, in a concert in Berlin including music of Toru Takemitsu ("From me flows what you call time") and Dmitri Shostakovich (the Symphony no. 5). Other orchestras he has conducted include the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the Radio Symphony Orchestras in Cologne (WDR), Stuttgart and Freiburg (SWR) and the Gürzenich Orchestra, the Frankfurter Museumsorchester, the Bamberg Symphony, the Düsseldorf Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Hamburg Philharmonic and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

Sado won first prize and became the third Japanese winner (after Seiji Ozawa in 1959 and Yoko Matsuo in 1982) at the 39th annual International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors in Besançon, France in 1989. In 1990, he became a regular participant in the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, along with Christoph Eschenbach and Michael Tilson Thomas.

In October 1993, he became Principal Conductor of the Lamoureux Orchestra. In October 1995, Sado was named the winner of the first Leonard Bernstein Jerusalem International Music Competition. Maestro Sado also serves as Artistic Director and Artistic Advisor of the Hyogo Performing Arts Center and principal conductor of the Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra which he helped establish in 2005. Sado also serves as the chief conductor of the Siena Wind Orchestra in Japan.