Hisatada Otaka

Hisatada Otaka (Tokyo, 1911 – Tokyo, 1951) was a Japanese composer and conductor, father of the conductor Otaka Tadaaki. His musical training began in Vienna, to which he moved while still a secondary school pupil, and to which he returned in 1934 after a brief period in Tokyo, where he had studied composition with Klaus Pringheim. His work lies at the intersection of German Romanticism and features of Japanese nationalism.

At the Vienna Academy of Music he studied composition with Marx and conducting with Weingartner, in addition to receiving private lessons from Franz Moser. In 1936 he won a Weingartner Prize for his Nihon kumikyoku for orchestra. After graduating in 1938 he worked as a conductor until returning to Japan in 1940, the year in which he became chief conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of Japan.

He wrote exclusively for instruments, with no large-scale vocal works in his principal catalogue, although he did set some songs to poems from the Man'yō-shū. Among his titles are the symphonic poem Ashiya otome, a Concerto for Flute and a Symphony, both from 1948. He died young, in 1951, and the orchestra with which he had conducted established a composition prize in his memory that bears his name.