Josef König - Performer

Josef König was a Czech violinist and conductor, born in Prague on 29 September 1874 and died in Harbin, Manchuria, on 5 December 1932. The son of the oboist Arnošt König, he entered the Prague Conservatory at eleven, studying with Antonín Bennewitz and Antonín Dvořák. In the early 1890s he was second concertmaster of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, where he became a lifelong champion of Sibelius. By 1899 he was in St Petersburg, first as a violin soloist and then as a conductor at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, working closely with Eduard Nápravník; from 1914 he was second conductor of the Imperial Ballet. In 1923 he emigrated to Manchuria and in 1924 became second concertmaster of the Chinese Eastern Railway orchestra in Harbin. Invited to Tokyo in 1925 for the Japanese-Russian joint concerts, he also conducted for the newly founded Tokyo radio. From 1927 to 1929 he was one of the two permanent conductors, with Hidemaro Konoye, of the New Symphony Orchestra (the forerunner of the NHK Symphony Orchestra), giving what is reported to be the first professional performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Japan as well as Sibelius's Second Symphony. After a scandal in 1929 he left Japan and returned to Harbin, where he conducted the Harbin Symphony Orchestra until his death. Historian Morihide Katayama described his influence on Japanese musicians such as Kōsaku Yamada and Shūkichi Mitsukuri as the König school. Source: Rondo DB


Usual Name	Josef König
Ensembles	NHK Symphony Orchestra from 1927 to 1929
Links	Wikipedia (Czech) , Wikipedia (Japanese) , Wikidata , MusicBrainz

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