Conductor Kazuki Yamada Makes Debut at CSO with Japanese Sensitivity
Conductor Kazuki Yamada acknowledges audience applause after leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Franck's Symphony in D Minor - May 16, 2024. (Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography)
Japanese Culture Exhibit Held in Pre-Concert Hours
Conductor Kazuki Yamada was invited by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) to conduct four performances on May 16, 17, 18, and 21, making his debut with the CSO. On the 21st, the last day of the performance, the Japanese Culture Center and the Japanese Arts Foundation hosted an exhibition featuring live performances of Sumi-e (ink painting) and calligraphy (Shodo), and display of the Ikenobo ikebana in the Chicago Symphony Center.
Since winning the first prize at the 51st Besançon International Conducting Competition in 2009, Yamada has been remarkably active both in Japan and abroad. He was appointed Chief Music Director and Artistic Advisor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) in the spring of 2023, and has also served as Artistic Director and Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo (OPMC) since the 2016/17 season.
At the CSO performance, Director Yamada conducted "How slow the Wind" by Toru Takemitsu, a composer who pioneered to integrate the Western and traditional Japanese music in orchestral pieces and gained worldwide fame; the second piece was César Franck's "Symphony in D minor", a highly acclaimed symphony of the late 19th century that combines lyrical beauty with brooding intensity; and after intermission, he welcomed Solorist Martin Helmchen and conducted Beethoven's piano concerto "No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15". Kazuki Yamada and Martin Helmchen received a standing ovation.
Director Yamada's performance was expressively beautiful. His conducting movements were flowing and elegant, inviting the musicians to bring out their artistry. It was as if he was leading the musicians with his heart, rather than directing them with the power of the conductor.
According to the CSO handbook, the time Yamada spent under the strict tutelage of Maestro Seiji Ozawa underscored the importance of what Yamada calls "Japanese sensibility" in classical music. Generally, most Japanese people are able to understand "Japanese sensibility" by the "heart" without words, but visual experience can help people overseas to understand the Japanese sense.
In this sense, the introduction of Japanese culture prior to the concert was well timed. At the venue, Patricia Larkin Greene used brushstrokes in a lean way to create a Sumi-e of cherry blossoms on a branch. Hekiun Oda also drew the kanji character for "sound" using a large brush with swift body movements. At the same venue, Charles Harris of the Ikenobo Ikebana exhibited ikebana arrangements.
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Conductor Kazuki Yamada
Director Kazuki Yamada was born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1979. He studied conducting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music under Kenichiro Kobayashi and Yoko Matsuo, and was fascinated by Mozart and Russian Romantic repertoire during his study there.
In 2009, he won the Besançon International Competition, attracting international attention.
He has continued to perform in Japan every season with the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. Immediately following his arrival in Birmingham, he led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) on a tour of Japan in the summer of 2023, and will lead the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo on a Japan tour in the summer of 2024.
Yamada has been instrumental in building the relationship between Birmingham and Monaco, resulting in collaborating performances with the CBSO Chorus and the OPMC; Mendelssohn's "Elijab" in 2019; Orff's "Carmina Burana" in 2023; and this season, Verdi's "Requiem" and Mahler's "Symphony No. 2" in both Birmingham and Monaco.
Conductor Kazuki Yamada makes his CSO debut leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Franck's Symphony in D Minor - May 16, 2024. (Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography)
Yamada has a busy international diary. The 2023/24 season began with his return to the BBC Proms with CBSO in the summer of 2023, followed by his debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Festival. He led the CBSO on tour to Germany and Switzerland in the fall 2023, followed by additional concerts in Europe in the spring of 2024. He continues regular guesting commitments with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, and Orchestre National de France in Paris.
He made debuts with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Oslo Philharmonic, and the Orquesta Nacionales de Espana in Madrid. Yamada has also performed with many soloists, including pianist Martin Helmchen.
Yamada puts great importance on his role as an educator and teaches as a guest artist every year at the Seiji Ozawa International Academy in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the CBSO's outreach programs.
After living in Japan, he now resides in Berlin. (Reference: the CSO Handbook)
Conductor Yamada will make his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on June 12, 13, and 14, 2025.
(For more information about Kazuki Yamada, visit https://kazukiyamada.com.)
Composer Toru Takemitsu
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was one of the first composers to fuse Western music with traditional Japanese music, and his symphonies made him world-renowned.
While recuperating from pneumonia, Takemitsu listened to music on the radio, and at the age of 16, he decided to become a composer. He then began studying scores and taught himself to play the piano.
At the age of 18, Takemitsu sought out Yasuji Kiyose as his teacher. Although he studied with Kiyose intermittently for a while, he was largely self-taught in composition. (He later described his main source of education as " this daily life, including all of music and nature.”) An important aspect of Takemitsu's approach to composition is that he first studied Western, not Japanese, music. (He once said that he was "During the war thirsty for it.")
It took another decade before Takemitsu became aware of the music of his own country. Ultimately, he explored both the Western innovation and the Japanese tradition simultaneously in a way that gave his work a unique sensibility. He became one of the first important composers to bridge the musical worlds of the East and the West.
Takemitsu was inspired by the complex relationship between the East and the West, their similarities and differences, so to speak. The integration of the two types of music was not always easy. (For example, Takemitsu once remarked that it was very difficult for Japanese composers to write fast music.)
Takemitsu had a broader musical understanding than most other composers because he studied European music as a foreigner and then his own country's music as someone who knew Western music first. He also walked the mountains of Indonesia, stopping in the villages to listen to their music.
Takemitsu was the first Japanese to visit a small remote island in Australia, where he spent several days with the Bushmen. And he found that their music was nothing like the music he had known. Aboriginal song and dance could not separate from the human experience, and he found it difficult to distinguish what was music and what was life. The Bushmen did not even have a special word for music.
In 1967, Takemitsu, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, attempted to write for symphony orchestra and traditional Japanese instruments for the first time. That work, “November Steps,” forced him to accept differences so profound, as he remarked, “Beyond words.” In his fusion of these traditions and cultures, Takemitsu anticipated, “Indeed, I believe that, in time, diverse cultures born of diverse peoples will be merged into one synthesis, that human beings will come to have one culture, immense and on a global scale,” he once said.
Takemitsu first came to the attention of this country when Seiji Ozawa led the CSO in the U.S. premiere of Takemitsu's "Requiem for String Orchestra" at the 1963 Ravinia Music Festival.
Stravinsky had heard the piece during a trip to Japan two years earlier, when radio engineers played it for him by accident. After listening to the work all the way through, he immediately pronounced that it was a masterpiece.
Although Takemitsu had already been composing for more than a decade, this was his first large-scale score. It was written in memory of his close friend and mentor, Japanese film composer Fumio Hayasaka, and anticipated the delicately detailed impressionistic sound world of Takemitsu's late works.
In February 1967 Takemitsu was stranded in Chicago for nearly a week by a blizzard that shut down the airport. He took a time to explore the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was drawn to the work of Odilon Redon. Some twenty years later, when he was commissioned to write a piece honoring the centennial of the Chicago Symphony, his first thought was of two Redon images, Mystere and Les Yeux clos (Closed Eyes). “Vision,” the resulting orchestral score, was given its premiere in the Chicago Symphony Center, under Daniel Barenboim (then the Orchestra’s music director designate), on March 8, 1990.
Conductor Kazuki Yamada makes his CSO debut in a program featuring the CSO’s first performance of Takemitsu’s How slow the Wind - May 16, 2024. (Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography)
The exquisitely nuanced work "How Slow the Wind," performed in this concert, is a 1991 orchestral piece that follows Takemitsu's "Vision" and is one of many of his works that deal with themes such as literature, nature and trees, constellations, gardens, and rain. Like "Dream Quotations," composed the same year, the piece takes as its starting point a passage from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Below is the full text of that Dickinson poem:
How slow the Wind-
How slow the sea-
How late their Feathers be!
Takemitsu wrote, “In this work, an attempt is made, by means of delicate changes in nuance in the restrained coloring, to create a perspective view of sound. The motif, which consists of seven tones, is like the original material before it was formed into a melody, and it moves in a repetitive cycle, like waves or the wind. And with each repetition of the cycle, the scene waves slightly, undergoing a subtle change in its appearance.” (Reference: the CSO Handbook)
Pianist Martin Helmchen
One of the most sought-after pianists, Pianist Martin Helmchen has been performing on the world's most important stages for decades. The originality and intensity of his interpretations, which he presents impressive tonal sensitivity and technical finesse, distinguish him as a musician.
In 2020 he was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Music Award for his recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the Deutsches Symphonie-Ochester Berlin under Andrew Manze, released by Alpha Classics. In 2022 he received the International Classical Music Award.
Martin Helmchen in a performance of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conductor Kazuki Yamada - May 16, 2924. (Photo credit: Todd Rosenberg Photography)
The 2023-2024 season began with a long awaited debut with the BBC proms, performing Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with the VVC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo. Additional concerts have taken him to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Zurich, Tonkunestler Orchestran in Vienna, Chamber Academy Potsdam, and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen including a touring project in Belgium.
In February 2024, he embarked on a piano trio tour with his wife, the cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker, and violinist Augustin Hadelich. Future engagements include the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
More information is available at https://www.martin-helmchen.de. (Reference: the CSO Handbook)