Toshihiko Kobayashi was born in Matsumoto, Japan, and began playing the violin at the age of 4. He attended the ‘Talent Education Institute’ in Matsumoto, where he was a direct student of Prof Dr Shinichi Suzuki until he graduated from university and also received lessons from William Primrose, among others.
After graduating from high school, he studied physics at Shinshu University Matsumoto due to his scientific interests. Parallel to his subsequent studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he majored in violin with Professor Koji Toyoda, he attended numerous masterclasses with Franco Gulli, Ida Haendel and Nathan Milstein, whose private pupil he subsequently became for several years in London. Even during this time, he performed regularly at home and abroad, as a soloist with orchestra, in violin recitals (duo violin/piano) and especially in solo recitals for violin alone. He also founded the ‘Kobayashi Music Academy Munich’ for young up-and-coming players.
Waltraut Mayr-Kobayashi was born in Berlin. She studied violin, viola and conducting at the Berlin University of the Arts, piano at Prof Dounias-Sindermann’s piano school, musicology at the Technical University of Berlin and at the University of Munich. Thanks to a scholarship from the Karl Klingler Foundation, she visited Japan in 1980/81 and 1984 to get to know and study the Suzuki method directly with Prof. Dr Shinichi Suzuki at its place of origin and finally received the Suzuki violin teacher diploma (Level A) from Dr Suzuki. Back in Munich, she founded the German Suzuki Society together with Marianne Klingler in 1983 and was also the first director of the German Suzuki Institute in Germany until 1985. She also taught as a lecturer at various national and international music workshops.
After developing her own teaching concept, she founded the ‘Kobayashi Music Academy Munich’ together with her husband Toshihiko Kobayashi, which opened in 1987. The academy serves to promote and train children and young people, particularly in the field of instrumental music in the subjects of violin, viola, cello, double bass, piano, chamber music and orchestral playing, as well as in the subjects of aural training and general music theory.
In addition to her teaching activities, she has also accompanied her husband as a piano partner on many concert tours at home and abroad over the years.