BIOGRAPHY
“The talented Toshi Ogita… playing Malcolm, with a fine future ahead of him…”
- Jenni Balow, Verdi’s Macbeth - Review, Minack Theatre, July 2019
Japanese tenor Toshi Ogita is fast developing a reputation for his warm, lyric voice. He is a graduate of the Master’s programme at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Richard Berkeley-Steele and Anna Tilbrook. Toshi was involved in numerous projects at the Academy, including its Bach cantatas series, and has worked as a soloist with Philippe Herreweghe, Rachel Podger, John Butt, and Iain Ledingham. Toshi has now been invited to join Bach Collegium Japan/Masaaki Suzuki.
Recent engagements include Chorus, Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci; Chorus, L’elisir d’amore (West Green House Opera), and Ferrando, Così fan tutte; Alfredo, La Traviata in staged scenes at the Arte Lirica Festival, Veneto. Opera scenes at RAM included Tamino (Die Zauberflöte), Tonio (La fille du régiment), Nemerino (L’elisir d’amore), Monsieur Vogelsang (Die Schauspieldirektor). Other work on the stage include Francesca Caccini, La liberazione di Ruggiero (Brighton Early Music Festival).
Concert performances include Evangelist+arias, Bach John Passion (Truro Cathedral), Haydn Creation (Winchester City Festival Choir), Handel Messiah (Southampton Choral Society) and Mozart Requiem (Truro Choral Society).
With his thoughtful, sensitive musicality, Toshi is also a keen recitalist. With Timothy Dean, he has performed Schubert's Schwanengesang and a selection from Schumann's Myrthen. Toshi has performed four songs from Alban Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder at RAM. With soprano Helen Lacey, semi-staged performances of Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch are planned.
Toshi has been selected to take part in workshops with British Youth Opera (Martin Lloyd-Evans and Audrey Hyland), and has performed in masterclasses with Florian Boesch and John Mark Ainsley.
Previously, Toshi read MA History of Art & History of Music at the University of Edinburgh, and sang with the choirs of Paisley Abbey, Truro Cathedral, Winchester Cathedral, and the London Oratory. Formerly a double bass player, Toshi was a Hesse student at the 2014 Aldeburgh Festival. Toshi lives in Hampshire with his family.
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Having been introduced by Scott Johnson to the writings of Richard Miller, Kenneth Bozeman, and David L. Jones, Toshi has a keen interest in vocal pedagogy. In particular, he is interested in how the tripartite system of respiration, phonation, and resonation is a non-linear synergistic one, influencing and interacting with each other; semantic differences and their implications; the relationship between sensory perception/kinesthesia vs. what is physiologically happening (the gap between subjective and objective understanding); pedagogic efficiency and how certain aims are prioritised over the course of teaching an individual.
Toshi's undergraduate dissertation (2016), titled ‘Lost to the World: the visual and musical cultures of fin-de -siècle Vienna’ explored the interaction between art and music in early 20th-century Vienna, through Schopenhauer and Wagner, specifically between Mahler and Klimt. The work has been praised for its originality by Christian Weikop, Peter Vergo, and Richard Stokes. Toshi is interested in music’s role as a socio-cultural indicator, historical examples of interdisciplinary collaboration, and exploring this through programming.