Subscription Concert A Series

Subscription Concert No.1018 A Series

Date: Mon. 7. April 2025 19:00 (18:00)

Venue: Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Venue Info Seat

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Artists

Kazushi ONO, Conductor
Kirill GERSTEIN, 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/

Kirill GERSTEIN (Piano)

Born in the former Soviet Union, Berlin-based American pianist Kirill Gerstein combines the traditions of Russian and Central European music-making with an insatiable curiosity. His solo, chamber, and concerto engagements have taken him all over the world. Among this seasonʼs highlights, he presents 3 major residencies: Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, at home and on tour, with Gilbert, Harding, Manacorda, and Erina Yashima, Londonʼs Wigmore Hall with a three-part concert series Busoni and His World, and Aix-en-Provence Festivalʼs 2023 Artist-in-Focus, leading the chamber music Academy, a cabaret evening with HK Gruber, and Rachmaninoffʼs Third Piano Concerto with LSO. His most recent recording, released in June 2023, is an homage to Rachmaninoff with Berliner Philharmoniker and K. Petrenko.

Program

Berg: Drei Orchesterstücke, op.6

Program Notes
Brahms: Piano Concerto No.2 in B-flat major, op.83

Program Notes

｜Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra, op.6

Ⅰ Präludium
Ⅱ Reigen
Ⅲ Marsch

Alban Berg: Born in Vienna, February 9, 1885; died in Vienna, December 24, 1935

　Alban Bergʼs Three Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6 had a protracted genesis. He wrote them in 1914, sending the first two to his teacher Arnold Schoenberg in September as a 40th birthday present, and completing the third piece by the end of the year. There was no performance of any kind until 1923, when the Präludium and Reigen were played in Berlin on June 5 with Anton von Webern conducting (the much longer Marsch movement had to be omitted due to limited rehearsal time for such a difficult score). The first complete performance waited until April 14, 1930 – nearly sixteen years after Berg had written the Three Pieces – when Johannes Schüler led an orchestra in Oldenburg using the revised edition of the score, which, incidentally, waited until 1954 to be published.
　Bergʼs initial plan was to write a symphony. Ideas were eventually consolidated into the Three Pieces, which are cast for an exceptionally large orchestra. This includes quadruple woodwinds (five clarinets), six horns, four each of trumpets and trombones, much percussion (even the large hammer that Mahler had used in his Sixth Symphony), two harps, and celesta. The utmost technical facility and agility is required from every instrument. Furthermore, Berg took textural density to a whole new level, with so many lines running concurrently that the first-time listener is easily bewildered. Scholar Mark de Voto encapsulates the Three Pieces in these words: “Bergʼs effort seems constantly to be striving beyond the already exaggerated extremes of musical expression and gesture that so strongly characterize Schoenbergʼs Five Pieces [and other works like Gurre-Lieder and the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande]. No other work of Bergʼs shows such a feverish complexity of texture, no other printed score of his contains such a density of expression marks or changes of tempo. … [The Three Pieces] tend to symbolize the feeling of utmostness, the last gasp of imperial splendor of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire that would soon be torn apart.”
　Manipulation and development of tiny motivic fragments is the operating principle behind the Three Pieces. De Voto identifies five of these, all first presented in the Präludium. Reigen incorporates the second, third, fourth and fifth of these fragments, while the Marsch uses the first, second, third and fifth. The highly perceptive ear may catch their first appearances as follows: (1) a six-note capsule played fortissimo by horns at the moment of the full orchestraʼs explosive outburst following the solo tromboneʼs pianissimo notes in its highest register. (2), (3), and (4) occur in quick succession about two minutes later; they are all embedded in the Präludiumʼs peak moment of volume and density, and nearly impossible to detect without recourse to the score. (5) is presented a few moments later, a pianissimo, descending series of eight chords played by tremolo violins.
　There is no denying the Three Pieces offer a considerable challenge to most listeners. Berg himself is on record as saying that his Three Pieces were “more complicated than anything else written to date.” Even conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, with his superbly analytical mind and didactic expertise, admits that conducting the Three Pieces is “fairly difficult.” Here are a few suggestions to help guide the attentive ear through Bergʼs score:
　The Präludium is structured in a clear-cut arch form, beginning with the faintest wisps of sound from unpitched percussion, moving on to pitched percussion (timpani, two players), then strings, then woodwinds. The music rises to a massive climax, then recedes, with timpani and finally unpitched percussion bringing the piece to a quiet ending.
Reigen translates as “round dance,” a term Berg uses freely, as the underlying feeling is often that of a waltz or a Ländler, dance rhythms familiar to Berg from earlier Viennese music. Even so, this is hardly music to dance to; the mood is highly charged and turbulent.
　The Marsch, too, is a title only faintly suggestive of its content. The mood is often frantic, the writing of extreme complexity. De Voto finds some 31(!) motivic and thematic elements here in addition to those five that unify the Pieces. Berg scholar Geroge Perle finds in the Marsch a “feeling of doom and catastrophe” associated with the clouds of war gathering over Europe as Berg composed this music.
　First-time listeners uncomfortable with chasing motivic fragments, trying to find dance impulses in undanceable music, and yearning for a real “melody” might best be advised to listen to the Three Pieces as a series of short episodes of continuously varying texture, density, tempo, dynamic nuance, and above all kaleidoscopic orchestration – not always “pretty,” but always fascinating.

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.
　

｜Brahms: Piano Concerto No.2 in B-flat major, op.83

Ⅰ Allegro non troppo
Ⅱ Allegro appassionato
Ⅲ Andante
Ⅳ Allegretto grazioso

Johannes Brahms: Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, April 3, 1897

　After the disappointing reception accorded the early performances of Brahmsʼs First Piano Concerto in 1859, the twenty-six-year-old composer proclaimed that “the second one will sound quite different,” and in many respects he was right. The Second Concerto does display a more heroic stature, Olympian splendor, grandeur of design and autumnal melancholy compared to the craggy, tempestuous, sprawling First. Despite its length, equaled in the standard piano repertory only by Brahmsʼs own previous concerto, it is more tautly organized as well. Even though more than twenty years separate the two concertos, they are both incomparable masterpieces.
　Following a trip to Italy in the spring of 1878, Brahms began sketches for his Second Piano Concerto at his summer place in the Austrian Alps at Pörtschach. The sketches were then laid aside, and it was not until three years later, again following a visit to Italy, that Brahms completed the work on July 7th, 1881. On that day he wrote to his friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg: “I have written a tiny pianoforte concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.”
　This of course was Brahmsʼs typically modest and playful way of understating his accomplishments, for in complexity, seriousness and epic breadth, it stands as a giant among concertos. It covers a vast range of moods, from stormy aggressiveness to soaring lyricism to majestic grandeur. Its technical difficulties are fearsome, but even the pianist who masters these must bring to the music a profound intellect and musical maturity. The orchestral contribution is every bit as important as the pianistʼs, and the soloist must accept his role as “first among equals.” Clearly this is no ordinary concerto. Brahms himself played the first public performance in Budapest on November 9, 1881 with Alexander Erkel conducting.
　The very opening exemplifies the concertoʼs close partnership of piano and orchestra. A long musical line is fragmented into statements from the solo horn, solo piano, winds/strings, and again the piano, all of which form a prelude-like dialogue to the grand orchestral exposition that follows. The movement is laid out along the basic lines of sonata form, employing a profusion of melodic ideas. The opening horn solo acts as a familiar landmark, appearing as a powerful theme for the full orchestra, as an interlude in the development section, as the signal that the recapitulation has arrived, and as the beginning of the coda.
　Brahms did not label the second movement a scherzo, but it is one in all but name. This is the “extra” movement, and the only one of the four not in B-flat major. Both the four-movement design and the use of a scherzo are rarities in the pre-twentieth-century concerto repertory. Two principal ideas are heard in rapid succession in the opening measures: a furiously aggressive rising theme in the piano, from which nearly the entire movement is derived, and a thin, wispy second subject high in the violins. The robust central passage in D major also derives from the opening gesture.
　Another unusual feature of this concerto is the exceptionally long and ravishingly beautiful cello solo in the Andante movement. As one of the many unifying elements of this concerto, we may note that the first six notes of the celloʼs theme are identical to those of the horn that opened the concerto, but in a different order. Brahms later turned this theme into a song, “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” (Op. 105, No. 2) about a dying girl, and used it again in an oblique reference in his Second Violin Sonata. One of the most magical moments in all Brahmsʼs orchestral music occurs during the long clarinet duet preceding the recapitulation. Donald Francis Tovey poetically described it as “a few notes spaced out like the first stars that penetrate the skies at sunset.”
　The Rondo-finale is generally more cheerful and dance-like than the previous movements, but Brahmsʼs characteristically dark sonorities and thick textures are present here as well. It is worth noting that although Brahms evokes images of leonine strength and monumentality, his orchestra is no larger than that for Beethovenʼs Fidelio Overture or Schubertʼs Fourth Symphony, both composed well over half a century earlier.

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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