Iwamoto Mari

Iwamoto Mari was a Japanese violinist and educator. She founded the Iwamoto Mari String Quartet and was a professor at the Tokyo Academy of Music.

Biography

Born in Japan to a Japanese father, Masahito Iwamoto, and an American mother, Marguerite. She took violin lessons from Anna Bubnova-Ono after the age of six. She was a child prodigy, winning the All Japan Music Competition's violin category in 1937.
From 1946 to 1949, she was a professor at the Tokyo Academy of Music, resigning the post in 1949 in order to spend a year in the USA. She stayed there in a year and half, and took lessons by George Enescu in Chicago, and Louis Persinger in New York at The Juilliard School. On 14 June 1950, she took a recital at the Town Hall.
She resumed to play a soloist after coming back to Japan. In addition, She founded the Iwamoto Mari String Quartet in 1967, with violinist Tomoda Yoshiaki, viola player Suganuma Junji and cellist Kuranuma Toshio; the quartet won a special prize at the Suntory Music Award in 1979, shortly prior to Mari's death from cancer on 11 May 1979.