Nahoko Kinoshita started playing oboe at the age of 15. Before this she studied piano, violin, clarinet, percussion, singing and composition. The sound of the oboe attracted Nahoko intensively and she fell in love with this challenging instrument. At the age of 18 she won the second prize as well as the best performance prize of audience´s choice in two solo competitions in Osaka. In 2005 she won the first prize with chamber music in TCHOKOHAI a chamber music competition in Japan. A year later she went to Paris to continue her oboe study at Conservatoire National de Regional de Paris with Jean Louis CAPEZZALI.
In 2008, she moved to Lausanne in Switzerland and started her professional orchestra playing career in orchestras such as Bern Symphony Orchestra, Biel-Bienne Symphony Orchestra and Lausanne Sinfonietta.
She was also active in contemporary music performance and participated in Geneva international contemporary music festival (Festival Archipel) during her study at Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne.
Later, in 2012, she won the position of principal oboe with Jyväskylä Sinfonia. Since then, Nahoko has been performing with orchestras around Finland. In addition to this she continues her performances and chamber music performances around other European countries and Japan. She enjoys giving lectures and coaching chamber music. She is also a wind band coach for local young school students every summer in Japan.
Nahoko is also actively collaborating with local artists around Jyväskylä. The gigs she performed with Jyväskylä´s well known DJ Joniveli in summer 2019 as a challenge of mixing oboe improvisation and DJ performance got great feedback from the audience. Nahoko performed Jukka Tiensuu´s work “Narcissus” for oboe solo and electronic sound with Ville Oinonen´s solo dance. It was a collaboration with Jyväskylä sinfonia and Face to Face Jyväskylä´s dance artist company.
Nahoko also started to play early music instruments in 2019. She is currently studying baroque oboe, classical oboe and baroque recorder at Sibelius Academy, specializing in French baroque music. As a hobby she enjoys playing medieval instruments such as bladder pipes and shawms and reading ancient music notation.