Subscription Concert C Series

Subscription Concert No.998 C Series

Date: Sat. 11. May 2024 14:00 (13:00)

Venue: Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre Venue Info Seat

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Artists

Tadaaki OTAKA, Conductor
Mariam BATSASHVILI, Piano

Profile

Tadaaki OTAKA (Conductor)

Tadaaki Otaka was born in 1947. He has conducted all major Japanese Orchestras. He is also a popular figure throughout the world particularly in the UK, where he is invited as Guest Conductor to London Symphony, London Philharmonic, and BBC Symphony, among others. Otaka made his Proms debut with BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 1988. He also received invitations to Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Bamberg Philharmonic and many others. In 1997,he was awarded the CBE, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to British musical life.

Mariam BATSASHVILI (Piano)

Mariam Batsashvili was born in Tbilisi in 1993.
She gained international attention as a pianist when she won the 10th Franz Liszt Piano Competition in Utrecht in 2014. She was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist. In August 2019 her first album was released for Warner Classics, in August 2022 her second album "Romantic Piano Masters".
She has performed with many of renowned orchestras such as BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Ulster Orchestra, Dutch Radio, Philharmonic Orchestra, Munich Symphony Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and others.
She also has appeared in numerous prestigious concert halls, such as Berliner Philharmonie, Wiener Konzerthaus, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Philharmonic Hall of St Petersburg, Tonhalle Zürich, Mozarteum Salzburg, Wigmore Hall. And many of major music festivals, such as BBC Proms, Cheltenham, Beethovenfest Bonn, the Schleswig-Holstein, the Piano City festival in Milan , Piano aux Jacobins festival in Toulouse, Rheingau Musik,, Edinburgh, Klavier-Festival Ruhr, have invited her.

Photo by Attila Kleb

Program

Takemitsu: 3 Film Scores

Program Notes
: Jose Torres: Music of Training and Rest
: Face of Another: Waltz
Bartók: Piano Concerto No.3, Sz.119 (1945)

Program Notes
Walton: Symphony No.1 in B-flat minor

Program Notes

Toru Takemitsu: Three Film Scores (excerpts)
　　Jose Torres: Music of Training and Rest
　　Face of Another: Waltz

Toru Takemitsu: Born in Tokyo, October 8, 1930; died in Tokyo, February 20, 1996

　　Toru Takemitsuʼs enduring reputation rests not only on his substantial catalogue of music for the concert hall, but equally on his activity as a prolific composer of high-quality film scores (nearly one hundred). The renowned director Akira Kurosawa, whose films include Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Kagemusha and Ran (the latter with a score by Takemitsu), said of the composer: “He watches my film and bounces his musical ideas off it. This way the music can carefully enhance the scene, but also his placement of the music gives life to things that werenʼt expressed in images alone. Through this collusion of picture and music the film evolves to a higher realm.”
　　Film was an essential part of Takemitsuʼs esthetic and artistic worlds for nearly his entire life. When traveling abroad, he made it a point to experience the films of whatever country he was visiting, even if he did not understand the language. Donald Richie, Japanologist and a former Curator of Film at New Yorkʼs Museum of Modern Art, wrote that “In film Takemitsu found a structure analogous to that of his own discipline.” Takemitsu commented that “The reason I love movies is because I experience them as music.” At the end of his life, on his deathbed, he wrote: “Iʼve been ill for nine months now, and in all that time I havenʼt seen a single movie.”
　　The music we hear on this program constitutes two of the three numbers derived from films that span nearly all of Takemitsuʼs career as a composer of film scores. They were assembled and published in 1994 under the title Three Film Scores. The first performance was given by the English String Orchestra conducted by William Boughton at the CineMusic Festival in Gstaad, Switzerland, on March 9, 1995.
　　From Jose Torres (1959), directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, comes a two-part evocation of a boxerʼs world, the one a bluesy accompaniment to a training session set amidst the seedy underside of New York, the other a poignant evocation of the boxer at rest. From Face of Another (1966), also directed by Teshigahara, we hear a lilting waltz touched with nostalgia. The theme of this highly acclaimed film is the search for identity, a search carried out amidst dreamscapes and surreal images.

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.
　

Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3, Sz 119 (1945)

Ⅰ Allegretto
Ⅱ Adagio religioso
Ⅲ Allegro vivace

Béla Bartók: Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sinnicolau Mare, Romania), March 25, 1881; died in New York City, September 26, 1945

　　Bartókʼs Third Piano Concerto was virtually complete when the composer was rushed from his New York apartment at 309 West 57th Street (near Carnegie Hall) to West Side Hospital on September 22, 1945. Upon his death four days later, only seventeen bars remained to be scored, a minor task undertaken by the composerʼs friend and fellow Hungarian, Tibor Serly (pronounced correctly in Hungarian, “Sharely). “Bartók wrote feverishly to the very last to complete the Piano Concerto,” reported Serly, “and it was touching to note that he had prematurely scrawled in pencil the Hungarian word vege (the end) on the last bar of his sketch copy as though he were desperately trying to reach it. On no other score had he ever written this word.”
　　Bartókʼs grim outlook during his last days is totally belied by the concertoʼs open-air freshness, lyricism, ebullient moods, and air of elegant simplicity. It is sometimes regarded as a “light” piece, especially when contrasted with the earlier two piano concertos which are richly endowed with driving rhythms, percussive force and dense textures. In addition, the Third Concerto is less dissonant than its predecessors, more tonally oriented. Its sense of classical proportion, economy of means and spare textures lend further cause to think of the work in something approaching Mozartian terms. The world premiere was given by the Philadelphia Orchestra on February 8, 1946, with a Hungarian conductor (Eugene Ormandy) and a Hungarian soloist (György Sándor).
　　The first movement, in sonata form, opens with a quiet ostinato in the strings, much like Mendelssohnʼs Violin Concerto. Over this the soloist spins out a long, elegant theme in octaves, music suggestive of Hungarian folk dance. The subordinate theme group (Scherzando) arrives shortly thereafter. Sweeping arpeggios in the piano and unison woodwinds announce the development section. The recapitulation begins after a series of trills on the violins.
　　The second movement, marked Adagio religioso, is in ternary (ABA) form. The outer sections employ a serene, hymn-like melody treated in a manner that strongly suggests a parallel with the slow movement of Beethovenʼs String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132. This is the music Beethoven entitled “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity in the Lydian Mode,” written after recovery from an illness. Bartók, perhaps only in wishful thinking since he knew his end was near, or perhaps cheered by the good news that relatives and friends had survived the war, incorporated this nondenominational but deeply-felt devotional music into his last complete work. Strings play the theme in the opening section, woodwinds in the closing section. In between these prayer-like outer sections comes one of those remarkable pieces of “night music” Bartók wrote periodically throughout his career − that nervous, flickering, quivering evocation of the mysterious sounds of birds, insects and rustling leaves in the dark of the night.
　　The finale follows without pause. It is a rondo full of strong syncopations, percussive impulses, virtuosic brilliance and contrapuntal elements largely absent from the earlier movements. Two episodes, each fugal in nature, alternate with statements of the main theme. The first of these episodes is angular and spiky, the second more lyrical and derived from the major scale. A coda of even greater brilliance and exhilaration than what preceded brings the concerto to a spectacular close.

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.
　

Walton: Symphony No. 1 in B-flat minor

Ⅰ Allegro assai
Ⅱ Presto con malizia
Ⅲ Andante con malinconia
Ⅳ Maestoso - Allegro brioso ed ardentemente

William Walton: Born in Oldham, England, March 29, 1902; died on Ischia (an island near Naples), March 8, 1983

　　For nearly two centuries − from the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 until the late nineteenth century − England produced no native-born composer of note. Then suddenly, as if to make amends for this dearth, a veritable mountain range of exceptional talents appeared in a steady line strung out across the entire twentieth century. One of the towering peaks in this range was Sir William Walton (knighted in 1951), who lived nearly to the age of 81 and became known as something of a prophet in his own land, a composer “who inspired in the British public not just admiration or affection but real love,” as Edward Greenfield put it in his obituary in Gramophone magazine.
　　Like all great composers, Waltonʼs music has an immediately identifiable quality that marks it unmistakably and exclusively as his own. He never associated with any school, esthetic cult or “ism,” nor could he be termed a radical or pioneer. What his music does have is sensuous lyricism, a tonal orientation spiked with dissonance, hard-edged brilliance, a fondness for major/minor ambiguities, and rhythmic virility sometimes tinged with jazz, all qualities found in the First Symphony.
　　The first performance of Waltonʼs complete First Symphony was given on November 6, 1935, with Sir Hamilton Harty conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. (The first three movements alone had been given earlier, on December 3, 1934, with Harty conducting the London Symphony.)
　　The symphony was showered with praise: “What a work, truly marvelous,” wrote Sir Henry Wood. “It was like the world coming to an end, its dramatic power was superb; what orchestration, what vitality and rhythmic invention − no orchestral work has ever carried me away so much.” To biographer Neil Tierney, it was “an irresistibly compelling work, romantic in style and of lofty dimensions … towering to Sibelian peaks in its rugged, hostile grandeur.”
　　The symphonyʼs opening pages might well have come right out of Sibelius: the growth of a chord (horns) over a pedal point in the timpani (B-flat), jagged rhythmic punctuation (second violins) and a melodic idea on a single pitch repeated with increasing speed and ending in a quick flourish (oboe). Out of these mere scraps Walton builds a movement of great tensile strength and powerful impact. It unfolds not in the traditional manner of presenting two or three contrasting themes followed by development and recapitulation, but more like how Sibelius once described the symphonic process: “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from Heavenʼs floor and asked me to put them together.”
　　The second movement is a scherzo in all but name, colored by the performance direction con malizia (with malice). Some think the “malice” has an autobiographical reference to the increasingly difficult time Walton was having with Imma Doernberg, the first great love of his life. There is no denying the biting sarcasm, irreverent wit, careening syncopations and pungent dissonances that pepper the pages of this movement. It is also a tour de force of orchestral virtuosity that keeps every member of the orchestra on his or her toes, not only for the technical facility required but for the wildly unpredictable intrusions of an occasional 5/4 bar into an otherwise furiously pounding triple meter. There is no contrasting Trio section, as found in most scherzo movements, to relieve the relentless tension.
　　Relief comes in the third movement, which Walton marked to be played con malincolia (a misspelling of malinconia, or melancholy). From the long melodic line introduced by the solo flute (doloroso molto espressivo) Walton weaves a soul-searching tapestry of inexorable organic growth, profound concentration and inner struggle resolving in an impressive climax. Much of this elaboration of the fluteʼs original line is given to the woodwinds.
　　The exuberant finale is in four sections, the outer two a short introduction and a final peroration, both maestoso and festive in character. This movement above all caused Walton no end of grief. He threw away several attempts. At the center is a substantial fugue. The symphonyʼs most brilliant pages occur in this movement, many of them suggestive of the Walton to be heard in the Shakespearean film scores that he began writing about this time (As You Like It, Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet) − a fitting conclusion to an English masterpiece.

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 Montrealʼs McGill University he lectured on music for over 25 years.
　

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