© Rikimaru Hotta / © Marco Borggreve/Naïve-Ambroisie

TMSO Special Concert in Osaka

This concert is over. Date: Sun. 21. April 2019 14:00 (13:00)

Venue: Festival Hall Venue Info Seat

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Artists

ONO Kazushi, Conductor
Nikolai LUGANSKY, Piano

Profile

Kazushi ONO (Music Director)

Kazushi Ono is the definitive musical citizen of the world, having been born in Tokyo, studied in Munich and forged his early career in Zagreb, Karlsruhe and Tokyo. This variety of influences has shaped an inquiring and profound musical intellect and an ability to communicate meaning across languages and cultures, leading to longstanding relationships around the world.
Ono trained in Europe under Wolfgang Sawallisch and came to public attention winning first prize in the 1987 Toscanini Competition. Since his first appointment at Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1992 he has held continuous positions, including at Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, Karlsruhe Opera, La Monnaie, Opéra National de Lyon, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and currently, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, New National Theatre Tokyo and Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra.
A favourite of orchestral players, he has lasting friendships with orchestras around the world and regularly guest conducts groups such as London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.
His passion and curiosity for repertoire takes him in different directions – to the standard classics but also to new music. He often commissions works and has collaborated several times with Mark-Anthony Turnage, including on Silent Cities, Hibiki (which won a Royal Philharmonic Society award) and Time Flies, which was originally commissioned for the 2020 Tokyo Olympiad. Recent commissions at NNTT include Asters by Akira Nishimura and Dai Fujikura’s A Dream of Armageddon. His programming there also includes Baroque, 20th-century and bel canto masterpieces.
In Europe he conducted the world premieres of Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjyo in Aix-en-Provence, Arnulf Hermann’s Der Mieter at Oper Frankfurt and Kaija Saariaho’s Emilie at Opéra de Lyon, as well as new productions of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and L’Enfant et les sortilèges at Glyndebourne and Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher at Opéra de Lyon. He has worked closely with boundary-breaking directors such as Dmitri Tcherniakov, Romeo Castellucci, Pierre Audi, William Kentridge and Mariusz Treliński
Ono is a vocal advocate for the role of culture in all our lives. During his time in Lyon he took part in a programme bringing opera to prisons and at TMSO he leads the inclusive SaLaD Music Festival, as well as working with community organisations for people with disabilities. In his new role in Brussels he will be part of an integration scheme for refugees. During the initial stages of the pandemic, he led ground-breaking research into the transmission of particles and the use of ventilation that meant that orchestras could get back to playing for audiences safely.
In 2017 he was awarded ‘Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ by French cultural minister Françoise Nyssen, adding to the prestigious Asahi Prize in January 2015, for his contribution to the development and progress of Japanese society.
https://www.kazushiono.com/

Nikolai LUGANSKY (Piano)

Nikolai Lugansky is a pianist who combines elegance and grace with powerful virtuosity. Recognised as a master of Russian and late romantic repertoire, Lugansky is renowned for his interpretations of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Chopin and Debussy and has received numerous awards. Concerto highlights for the upcoming season include performances with Berlin Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Spanish National Orchestra as well as a UK tour with the St Petersburg Philharmonic. A regular recitalist the world over, during this season Lugansky appears in Paris, Vienna Konzerthaus and Flagey in Brussels. Lugansky regularly performs at international festivals includes BBC Promos, La Roque d’Anthéron and Verbier Festival. In 2019 Lugansky received the Russian Federation National Award in Literature and Art, for his contribution to the development and advancement of Russian and international classical music culture over the past 20 years. He records for Warner and Harmonia Mundi.

Program

Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor, op.16

Program Notes
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, op.14

Program Notes

Ⅰ Allegro molto moderato
Ⅱ Adagio
Ⅲ Allegro moderato molto e marcato

Edvard Hagerup Grieg: Born in Bergen, June 15, 1843; died there September 4, 1907

It is hardly surprising that Grieg’s only large-scale orchestral work is a piano concerto, for, like Chopin, the piano was the instrument central to his compositional output. Grieg’s first works were for the piano, written as a teenager, and he wrote all his life for the instrument, including ten volumes of Lyric Pieces. The melodic inspiration, wonderful freshness and harmonic piquancy that distinguish these pieces are found as well in the Piano Concerto.

Grieg was the first composer from Norway to achieve international recognition in a big way, and it was his Piano Concerto, written at the age of 25, that brought him his first major success. It was written mostly during the summer months of 1868 while Grieg was spending an idyllic vacation in the town of Søllerød in the Danish countryside. The first performance was given by Edmund Neupert, Norway’s leading pianist of the day, on April 3, 1869 at Copenhagen’s Royal Theater. The concerto was also dedicated to Neupert.

Musical connoisseurs have long made an exercise of comparing two of the world’s most popular piano concertos written in the mid-nineteenth century, Schumann’s (1841/1845) and Grieg’s. Both concertos open with an orchestral “bang” followed by a cascade of octaves from the soloist, and have for their first themes a plaintive melody played by the woodwind choir. In fact, Grieg modeled his entire first movement on Schumann’s.

But Grieg was no mere imitator. The music is deeply imbued with a quality all his own. Building on the stylistic inheritance of the German romantic tradition, Grieg integrates elements of Norwegian folk music as well as individual touches of his own musical personality (fondness for certain intervals, melodic turns of phrase, etc.). The Norwegian elements are most pronounced in the final movement. Here, the principal theme, announced by the piano, conforms to the rhythmic pattern of the halling (a national dance), combined with the sound effects suggestive of the Hardanger fiddle (bare fifths, drones, slides to a dissonant pitch). Towards the end of the movement, this halling pattern becomes a springdans when the theme is played in triple rather than duple meter.
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

Ⅰ Reveries, Passions Largo - Allegro agitato e appassionato assai
Ⅱ A Ball Valse. Allegro non troppo
Ⅲ Scene in the Country Adagio
Ⅳ March to the Scaffold Allegretto non troppo
Ⅴ Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath Larghetto - Allegro

Hector Berlioz: Born in La Côte-Saint-André, near Grenoble, December 11, 1803; died in Paris, March 8, 1869

“All modern programmists have built upon him ー Liszt, Richard Strauss
and Tchaikovsky. Wagner felt his influence. ... He is the real beginner of that interpenetration of music and poetic idea which has transformed modern art.” Thus did the English musicologist Ernest Newman eulogize Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie fantastique stands at the pinnacle of the genre known as the “program symphony.” By the composer’s own admission, Goethe’s Faust contributed to the inspiration that produced the Symphonie fantastique. The power and originality of Beethoven’s symphonies, especially the Eroica, and the depth of vision embodied in the Shakespeare plays also fed Berlioz’ emotional and psychic appetite.

But by far the strongest and most direct influence on the composition of the symphony was a young Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, who appeared in Paris as Ophelia and Juliet in productions by a touring company from England. When Berlioz first saw her on stage on September 11, 1827, he was so overwhelmed and consumed with passion for her that he became like a man possessed. His physical and mental turmoil are extravagantly expressed in numerous letters, from which the following excerpt is characteristic: “I am again plunged in the anguish of an interminable and inextinguishable passion, without motive, without cause. ... I hear my heart beating, and its pulsations shake me as the piston strokes of a steam engine. Each muscle of my body shudders with pain. In vain! ‘Tis terrible! Oh unhappy one!” All this, three years after he had first laid eyes on Harriet, and Berlioz still hadn’t met her face to face!

In a heroic gesture designed to attract her attention to his burning love, this most romantic of Romantics wrote his Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist to prove to her that he too was a dramatic artist. The performance took place on December 5, 1830, though Harriett apparently was unaware of the event. Two years later, Berlioz revised the symphony and created a long sequel, Lélio, or The Return to Life, preceded by an extended spoken monologue. He mounted a production of this triple bill, contriving through friends to have Harriet in attendance this time. This event took place on December 9, 1832. The ruse worked: Berlioz eventually met Harriet and married her a few months later, but it was not a happy union, and they separated after a decade, by which time Berlioz already had a mistress.

The most prominent autobiographical element of the score is the use of the idée fixe, a melody that recurs throughout each of the five movements in varying guises ー fervent, beatific, distant, restless, diabolical, etc., depending on the changing scene. This idée fixe (a term borrowed not from music but from the then-new science of psychology) actually operates on two levels, for it can also be regarded as a quasi-psychological fixation that possesses the music as it possesses the thoughts of the artist of the program.

The drug-induced fantasy world of the symphony is only one of its unusual and original aspects. Not just the content, but the degree of detail Berlioz provided paved the way for the tone poems of Liszt and Strauss. Another novelty was the use of the orchestra as a giant virtuoso instrument for the conductor to play upon. (The concept of conducting as a role apart from instrumental participation was still in its infancy.) But above all, it is the myriad examples of orchestral effects and tonal colors that make this work so endlessly fascinating: the otherworldly wisps of sound high in the violins in the slow introduction; the distant, plaintive oboe and English horn calls, and the threatening thunderstorm heard on four differently-tuned timpani in the third movement; the terrifying brass and drum effects in the March; the grisly scraping and twittering in the introduction of the last movement, followed by the diabolical parody of the idée fixe in the high E-flat clarinet accompanied by a galloping figure on four bassoons; then comes the Dies irae theme in the tubas, accompanied by deep bells. The list could go on and on ...

Here are some of Berlioz’ own descriptive comments about each movement:
　Ⅰ　“A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. [It] plunges him into a deep slumber during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. He recalls first that soul-sickness ... then the volcanic love, his frenzied suffering, his jealous rages, his returns to tenderness.
　Ⅱ　“He encounters the loved one at a dance.
　Ⅲ　“One summer evening in the country ... the scenery, the quiet rustling of the trees all concur in affording his heart an unaccustomed calm.
　Ⅳ　“He dreams he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to the scaffold.
　Ⅴ　“He sees himself in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries. The beloved melody appears again ... it is she, coming to join the Sabbath. She takes part in the devilish orgy.”
Program notes by Robert Markow

Robert Markow's musical career began as a horn player in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He now writes program notes for orchestras and concert organizations in the USA, Canada, and several countries in Asia. As a journalist he covers the music scenes across North America, Europe, and Asian countries, especially Japan. At Montreal's McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.

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