TMSO Special（6/15）

This concert is over. Date: Sun. 15. June 2025 14:00 (13:00)

Venue: Muza Kawasaki Symphony Hall

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Artists

Nodoka OKISAWA, Conductor
Frank BRALEY & Keigo MUKAWA, Piano

Profile

Nodoka OKISAWA (Conductor)

Nodoka Okisawa has been appointed as the 14th Chief Conductor of the City of Kyoto Symphony Orchestra. During her initial three-year term which began in April 2023, she will lead the renowned Japanese orchestra in subscription, education and family concerts.
Nodoka is the winner of the prestigious Concours international de jeunes chefs d'orchestre de Besançon 2019, where she was awarded the Grand Prix, the Orchestra Prize and the Audience Prize. Furthermore, in 2018 she won the Tokyo International Music Competition for Conducting, one of the most important international conducting competitions.
From 2020 to 2022, Nodoka Okisawa held a scholarship at the Karajan Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker and was also assistant to Kirill Petrenko. In addition to her own concert projects together with the academy members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, she also conducted the Solidarity Concert for Ukraine in March 2022 with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker at the invitation of the Federal President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Another highlight was the joint anniversary concert with Kirill Petrenko to mark the 50th anniversary of the Karajan Academy in May 2022.
In the 2023/24 season, Nodoka Okisawa makes her debut with the Kammerorchester Basel, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Québec and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, among others. She will also make her subscription debut with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo and returns to the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and the Münchener Symphoniker, where she was Artist in Residence during the 2022/23 season.
She is a regular guest with leading orchestras in Japan, including the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa. At the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival 2022, the 30th anniversary edition of the festival, Nodoka Okisawa made her debut with the Saito Kinen Orchestra conducting Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro" in a production by Laurent Pelly.
Okisawa attended numerous masterclasses, including with Neeme and Paavo Järvi and Kurt Masur. In 2019 she was selected for the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy in Tokyo. She has gained further experience in the past as assistant conductor of the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa and in opera productions in Japan and Europe.
In November 2020, she conducted a production of Lehár's "The Merry Widow" at the Tokyo Nikikai Opera Theatre.
In 2023, Nodoka Okisawa was awarded the "Hideo Saito Memorial Fund Award" by the Sony Music Foundation.
Born in Aomori, Japan, she learned to play the piano, cello and oboe from an early age. She studied conducting at the Tokyo University of the Arts with Ken Takaseki and Tadaaki Otaka and graduated with a master’s degree.
In 2019 she obtained her second master’s degree at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin under Christian Ehwald and Hans-Dieter Baum. Nodoka Okisawa lives in Berlin.
photo ©Felix Broede

Frank BRALEY (Piano)

Frank Braley is considered today one of the best French pianists with musical maturity and clarity.
Began studying the piano at the age of four, six years later he gave his first concert with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in Paris. He entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and three years later he was awarded unanimously first prizes for piano and chamber music. In 1991, he won the First Grand Prize at the Queen Elizabeth Competition of Belgium.
Since then, Frank Braley has been regularly invited to Japan, China, Canada, the United States, and all over Europe, to play with world leading orchestras under prestigious conductors.
He also gave actively recitals and chamber music concerts, and often played with R. and G. Capuçon, Pires, Le Sage, Pahud, Maisky, and more.
Frank Braley is teacher at the Paris Conservatory and was the Music Director of the Belgium Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie from 2014 to 2021.
photo ©Warner Capucon

Keigo MUKAWA (Piano)

In 2021, he won third prize at the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition, one of the most prestigious competitions in the world, and in 2019, the second prize at the Long-Thibaud-Crespin International Competition, the most prestigious competition in France. Having received much attention winning top prizes in two international competitions with a long history and tradition, he is currently performing in a wide range of activities including solo recitals, performances with orchestra, and chamber music,based in Japan and France.
His repertoire ranges from baroque to contemporary music, and he is known for his pursuit of the stylistic beauty of each period and composer, as well as his versatile tone quality. Not only the modern piano but he is also engaged in researching techniques for the fortepiano.
After graduating from the Tokyo University of the Arts, he moved to France in 2014 after being accepted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris with unanimous top honors by the jury.

photo ©Yuji Ueno

Program

Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Program Notes
Poulenc: Concerto for 2 Pianos in D minor

Program Notes
Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps

Program Notes

Claude Debussy: Born in St. Germain-en-Laye, August 22, 1862; died in Paris, March 25, 1918

　　The inspiration for Debussyʼs first orchestral masterpiece came from the poem “Lʼaprès-midi dʼun faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1876) by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The Symbolists worked with elusive images, imprecise feelings, evocative atmosphere, sensuous language, abstruse syntax, transient ideas, inferences and subtleties, all bathed in a suggestive half-light.
　　Debussyʼs musical sensibilities corresponded closely to the Symbolist aesthetic, and having read Mallarméʼs poem sometime around 1877, the composer set about creating a musical interpretation that influenced the course of much twentieth-century music. Written in 1892-1894, it was first heard on December 22, 1894 in Paris. A faun, incidentally, is a mythological woodland creature which walks upright like a man, but which has cloven hoofs, horns, a tail and fur like a beast. Its chief concerns are eating, sleeping and the pursuit of sensuous gratification.
　　The substance of Mallarméʼs poem, what the English critic Edmund Gosse called a “famous miracle of unintelligibility,” is described in his well-known synopsis as follows: “A faun … wakens in the forest at daybreak and tries to recall his experience of the previous afternoon. Was he the fortunate recipient of an actual visit from nymphs, white and golden goddesses, divinely tender and indulgent? Or is the memory he seems to retain nothing but the shadow of a vision, no more substantial than the ‘aired rainʼ of notes from his own flute? He cannot tell … The sun is warm, the grasses yielding; and he curls himself up again, after worshipping the efficacious star of wine, that he may pursue the dubious ecstasy into the more hopeful boscages of sleep.”
　　The musicʼs luxuriant effects, its lambent colors and tonal ambiguities are all a reflection of Mallarméʼs own style. The poet is said to have exclaimed: “This music prolongs the emotion of my poem and sets its scene more vividly than color.”
　　Pierre Boulez sums up the historical import of the Faune in these words: “The flute of the Faune brought new breath to the art of music; what was overthrown was not so much the art of development as the very concept of form itself, here freed from the impersonal constraints of [classical forms], giving wings to a supple, mobile expansiveness, demanding a technique of perfect instantaneous adequacy. Its use of timbres seemed essentially new, of exceptional delicacy and assurance in touch.”

　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 Allegro ma non troppo
Ⅱ Larghetto
Ⅲ Finale: Allegro molto

Francis Poulenc: Born in Paris, January 7, 1899; died in Paris, January 30, 1963

　　Francis Poulenc was one of the strangest figures in twentieth-century music. The deeply thoughtful and the frivolous existed side by side in his dual personality. He had little harmony instruction and no formal education at all in orchestration, counterpoint or analysis. Much of his musical conditioning, outlook and taste came from close contact with, and influence from, contemporaries in Paris during the teens and twenties, including Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and the members of a group that music history has come to call Les Six – Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, and especially Georges Auric. Poulenc too was one of Les Six, a name bestowed upon the group by a newspaper reporter in 1920, though the members themselves thought of themselves as the Nouveaux Jeunes (young newcomers). Together they rebelled against the formality and mysticism of Franck, the Impressionism of Debussy, and grand gestures of Romanticism. These were replaced by the traditional French qualities of wit, brevity and clarity, along with influences from jazz, music-hall revues, and Balinese gamelan music. The spirit that infuses the concerto on this program can be found in this excerpt from Milhaudʼs autobiographical journal Notes sans musique (Notes without Music):
　　“We used to meet regularly at my home over a period of two years. Paul Morand would make cocktails and then we went off to a little restaurant at the top of the rue Blanche … After dinner we used to roam through the Montmartre fairground, delighted with the old-fashioned roundabouts, the strange shops, quaint attractions such as the Daughter of Mars, the rifle ranges and lotteries, the menageries and the din from the barrel-organs with their perforated rolls that seemed to blare out simultaneously every tune and ditty to be heard at that time at the Paris music-halls and revues … Eventually we returned to my home. The poets read their verse and we played our latest works. Many fruitful artistic collaborations may be traced back to these gatherings, and also certain works illustrating to what amounted to the new music-hall aesthetic.”
　　The Concerto for Two Pianos was written in 1932 on commission from the musical patroness Princess Edmond de Polignac. It received its first performance on September 5 of that year in Venice with Desire Defauw conducting the orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala. The composer and his friend Jacques Février were the soloists. This has become one of Poulencʼs most frequently performed compositions, and one of the very few by a famous composer to feature two pianists in a concerto. In fact, aside from Mozartʼs it remains the second-best known of its kind.
　　The work is in three movements and lasts about twenty minutes. The first opens with dashing scale-like passages in an even rhythmic pattern that gives the music a grand Baroque flavor. The contradictory nature of Poulencʼs musical mind is soon revealed in the intrusion of a saucy dance-hall tune. The slow movement begins with a characteristically charming touch: a solo piano offers a delicate theme that could easily serve as the Larghetto of a Mozart piano sonata. This somewhat wistful movement is followed by a finale of great verve and virtuosity spiked with wit plus a sentimental interlude tucked in for good measure.

　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 L'adoration de la Terre (The Adoration of the Earth)
　　Introduction - The Augers of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls -
　　Ritual of Abduction - Spring Rounds - Ritual of the Rival Tribes -
　　Procession of the Sage - The Sage - Dance of the Earth
Ⅱ Le Sacrifice (The Sacrifice)
　　Introduction - Mystic Circles of the Young Girls -
　　Glorification of the Chosen One - Evocation of the Ancestors -
　　Ritual Action of the Ancestors - Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)

Igor Stravinsky: Born at Oranienbaum (a resort near St. Petersburg), June 17, 1882; died in New York City, April 6, 1971

　　Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring,
　　What right had he to write the thing,
　　Against our helpless ears to fling
　　Its crash clash cling clang bing bang bing?

　　The anonymous author of this witty verse, which appeared in the Boston Herald following the local premiere of Le Sacre du printemps, obviously hadnʼt been able to come to terms with this most revolutionary of masterpieces, even eleven years after its riotous Paris premiere in 1913. But Stravinskyʼs right to create was not really in question. The issue concerned in part the musicʼs unprecedented degree of explosive power, volcanic sounds produced by a gigantic orchestra, savage rhythmic impulses, and rending dissonances, all of which combined to provoke early critics into speaking or writing as if, in the words of Donald Mitchell, “the music had done them personal injury, physical violence, as if the score of the ballet were an instrument of aggression.”
　　But its brutality and violent dissonance were not the only reasons for the reaction Sacre engendered. It seemed to reach deep into the subconscious, to activate instinctual, primal feelings and responses that are often depicted in myths. The mythic, archetypal element of Sacre has led some commentators to interpret the score in terms of Jungian psychology.
　　Stravinsky described the moment of conception, which took place during the spring of 1910 while he was working on The Firebird in St. Petersburg, in these terms (from Chronicle of My Life): “I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” He then described the vision to Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets russes, who saw balletic possibilities in it, and to the designer, painter and archeologist Nicholas Roerich.
　　Well before Sacreʼs premiere, Pierre Monteux, conductor of the historic performance, sensed the approaching trauma. He wrote of his initial acquaintance with the music: “With only Diaghilev and myself as audience, Stravinsky sat down to play a piano reduction of the entire score. Before he got very far I was convinced he was raving mad. … My only comment at the end was that such music would surely cause a scandal.”
　　And cause a scandal it did − probably the most famous musical scandal of the century. At the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, on May 29, 1913, the audience almost immediately began laughing, booing, and heckling. Unrest turned to anger, and then to violence, requiring an appearance by the gendarmes. The ballet, choreographed by Nijinsky, managed to continue to the end, but for weeks and months afterwards, newspapers and journals were filled with vivid descriptions of the event. Carl van Vechten dubbed it “war over art.” Léon Vallas referred to it as “Le Massacre du printemps.” The whole phenomenon of Le Sacre du printemps is perhaps most succinctly summarized in Pierre Boulezʼ statement: “It has become the ritual − and the myth − of modern music.”

　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.
　

【Soloist Encore】（6/15up）
Poulenc：Caprice, FP 155
（Frank BRALEY & Keigo MUKAWA, Piano）

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