Inspired by a Canadian fiddle legend, Ashley MacIsaac, Sora began playing the makeshift violin that consisted of twigs, Lego-blocks, and scrubbies when he was three years old. A month before he turned four, he enrolled in the Suzuki Program at Oscar Peterson School of Music, formerly known as the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM), in Toronto. Since 2018, Sora has been studying the violin in the studio of Professor Atis Bankas at the Phil and Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists. He is a recipient of the Taylor Prize, a full scholarship with generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, at the Taylor Academy. He was also awarded with an opportunity to play on a rare Testor violin, generously donated by an anonymous donor to and loaned by the Taylor Academy, in the fall term of 2021. Sora is a second prizewinner of Oakville Chamber Orchestra Youth Concerto Competition in 2022, and he is scheduled to perform as a soloist with Oakville Chamber Orchestra in 2023. He is also a winner of the Taylor Academy Concerto Competition in 2022 and, as such, he had the honor of performing as a soloist with a Chamber Orchestra, which, led by Professor Bankas, consisted of distinguished artists of Glenn Gould School of Music in Toronto, on April 5, 2022. Sora gave his first public performance at the age of seven with the Gould String Quartet in Niagara-On-The-Lake. Since then, he has been invited by Music Niagara to perform on various occasions in Niagara-On-The-Lake. He was also featured at StirlingFest in Stirling Ontario. In December 2019, he won in both of the two categories of the concerto competitions he participated in—for Canadian Sinfonietta and for Milton Philharmonic Orchestra—at Unionville Music Competition. As a result, he had the opportunity to collaborate with Canadian Sinfonietta in March 2020, shortly before the pandemic shuttered live performance venues. Sora is scheduled to appear in an episode of the TVO program, Backyard Beats, in April 2022. He was recently featured in the inaugural episode of Not-So-Late-Show, which showcased outstanding artists of diverse musical genres. In less formal settings, he has enjoyed performing in communities across Ontario as well as in Japan at various fund-raising and outreach events. In addition to playing the violin, Sora is passionate about composition. He is currently working on orchestral music for W. Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He also loves drawing, sculpting, solving math problems, fishing, biking, skating, and playing table tennis. He is a grade seven student in the gifted program at Winona Drive Public School in Toronto.
H. Wieniawski, Violin Concerto No. 2, 1st mvt.
