No. 2043 Subscription (Program B)

The next year 2026 will mark the 30th anniversary of the passing of Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996), a pioneer and one of the first Japanese composers to be warmly welcomed abroad. His concerto November Steps (1967) for two Japanese traditional instruments, premiered in New York, helped to make Takemitsu’s name known in the world.
The highly productive composer, a devoted cinephile as well, wrote the soundtrack for numerous movies and TV series, collaborating with leading directors including Akira Kurosawa (for Dodes’ka-den and Ran). For Takemitsu, film music was the perfect field to experiment with instruments—especially Japanese traditional ones—and idioms/styles/genres new to him, to utilize them later in his concert works. In so doing, he ushered in a new phase in Japanese film scoring.
In his later years, Takemitsu eagerly arranged his soundtracks for concert. Three Film Scores, a suite for string orchestra, was prepared in 1994–1995 and premiered at Gstaad’s CineMusic Festival, Switzerland in 1995, a year before the composer’s death. I Music of Training and Rest from Jose Torres is tinged with jazz. This is a rework of his score for Jose Torres (1959, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara), a documentary on the Puerto Rican boxer filmed in New York. II Funeral Music from Black Rain is from the score for Black Rain (1989, by Shōhei Imamura) portraying survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. III Waltz from Face of Another, melancholic and tuneful, is heard with German lyrics in the Kafkaesque movie Face of Another (1966, by Hiroshi Teshigahara) based on Kōbō Abe’s intensely dramatic novel.

[Kumiko Nishi]

In music history, not a few masterpieces have been unfavorably received at the outset, because of being ahead of the time and/or being first performed unideally. And Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was a perfect example of that.
Op. 61 (1806) is the only violin concerto completed by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) apart from two short Romances for violin and orchestra. It dates from his exceptionally productive period when his great masterpieces such as the Symphonies No. 4 and No. 5, the Piano Concerto No. 4 and the three Razumovsky string quartets were written. It was the composer’s friend and violinist Franz Clement, the commissioner of the concerto, who played the solo part for the premiere in 1806 in Vienna. Beethoven reportedly finished writing it barely in time for the concert and Clement had to play it mostly at sight. The piece was hardly programmed again during the composer’s lifetime. After Beethoven’s death in 1844, the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim, well-known today as Johannes Brahms’ best friend, performed it under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn (mentioned below). This successful event was the impetus for the revival of the piece.
The Violin Concerto’s start with timpani solo, unwonted at the time, already tells us why this music perplexed people at the premiere. The unusual length of the first movement in sonata form might have surprised them, too. On top of that, they had to wait for as long as four minutes listening to the woodwinds introducing the pastoral first theme and the arched second theme, until the leading role—violin solo—finally entered. The slow movement is an equable variation on the theme given at the beginning by the strings utilizing mutes, a device used to make a softer sound. It ends with the soloist’s brief cadenza (improvisatory passage) which is followed seamlessly without pause by the lively final movement in rondo form. It is opened by the solo violin stating instantly the folkish, recurrent main theme.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Born and raised in northern Germany, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847) is known as a musician representative of early German Romanticism alongside Robert Schumann (1810–1856) and Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Gifted but short-lived (he died of a sudden death at age 38), Mendelssohn wore many hats: as a masterly composer, an excellent pianist, an inspirational conductor who led the prestigious Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, an indefatigable educator who founded the Leipzig Conservatory and a leader of the “revival” of J. S. Bach’s works.
Mendelssohn’s Italienische (Italian) Symphony No. 4, one of his most popular works, was the fruit of his trip to Italy as with Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 (1881) and Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 (1902): Italy has always fascinated composers traveling from northern countries to stir their creativity with its luminous sunlight, beautiful views, abundant historical artworks and architecture as well as religious authority. As it was the custom of the time among wealthy upper classes in Europe, Mendelssohn in his early twenties was sent on a European grand tour “to refine his own taste” (his own words). Having a gift for painting as well, he sketched diversified scenery in his journal during this journey.
The young traveler visited Venice and Florence in October 1830 to be exposed to Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. He then arrived in Rome coincidentally when the Vatican mourned the demise of Pope Pius VIII (Papacy: –November 1830) and celebrated the ascension of Pope Gregory XVI (February 1831–). Mendelssohn experienced Rome’s renowned Carnival and the Papal choir singing at Easter services in the Sistine Chapel. And during this sojourn in Rome, he interacted with Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)—the latter would complete his Harold en Italie in 1834—, penned the Hebrides Overture—a musical souvenir from his trip to Scotland—and developed the idea for the Italian Symphony. He also stayed over Naples and Milan before leaving for Switzerland and then France. Completed in 1833, the Italian Symphony was premiered under the composer’s own baton in London the same year.
Interestingly, the Italian Symphony doesn’t just sound sunny. It instead shows a vivid contrast between light and shade alternating major with minor keys, which provides a profoundness for this mature symphony. The opening sonata movement lets the violins immediately sing the sunshiny first theme in A major, before the serenely hopping second theme is given by the woodwinds. The slow second movement in D minor, a rondo in ABABA form, evokes a prayerful procession, while the third movement in A major is a minuet-like dance having the idyllic central section with horn calls. A surprise is the finale which starts and concludes in A minor but not A major. Here we hear a saltarello, an Italian high-speed dance in triple time traditionally danced at Rome’s Carnival, and a tarantella, a feverish three-beat folk dance originally from southern Italy.

[Kumiko Nishi]