The daughter of a Japanese pianist and a Swedish architect, Ingrid Fuzjko Hemming grew up with her mother in Japan from the age of five. She was already winning prizes in piano competitions as a schoolgirl, including the NHK Mainichi and the Bunka Radio Broadcasting Company competitions. She returned to Europe at the age of twenty-eight and studied first at the Royal Music Institute in Berlin (today’s University of the Arts) and then in Vienna.
In 1971, she had a sudden attack of fever during a concert and lost her hearing in one ear, which forced her to withdraw to Stockholm for medical treatment. Later she gave a number of concerts in Europe, before returning to Japan in 1995.
She became even more widely renowned after the Japanese state broadcasting company NHK produced a film about her life in February 1999. Also in that year she released a first CD with La Campanella by Franz Liszt, which has sold more than two million copies to date. Numerous other CDs followed, four of them winning Japan’s Golden Disc Award.
