No. 2062 Subscription (Program C)

To commemorate its 100th anniversary since its 1926 foundation, the NHK Symphony Orchestra (hereafter NHKSO) has given the Japanese Composer Series with three unique programs this year. Among them is today’s featuring two Japanese composers whom the NHKSO had a close relationship with.
Yuzo Toyama (1931–2023) led Japan’s post-war classical music scene. He studied composition in Tokyo with Kanichi Shimoosa (1898–1962), a pupil of Paul Hindemith, before honing his musical skills in Vienna. Toyama first joined the NHKSO as a Percussion Trainee in 1952 and became their Assistant Conductor two years later. Since his official conducting debut with the NHKSO in 1956 at age 25, he regularly led it both inside and outside the country. In 1979, the NHKSO appointed him Permanent Conductor, the post he held until his passing.
Toyama as a composer left us numerous works across a variety of genres. As with his representative work Rhapsody for Orchestra (1960), Divertimento for Orchestra (1961) is a treasure chest of folk melodies from various parts of Japan. The NHKSO assumed the Japanese premiere in 1963.
The opening movement evokes the country’s cheery folk music world with high notes from the flutes and steady timpani beats. The first theme given at the outset by horns and cellos is a take on the folk song Donpan-bushi from Akita (bushi means tune), while the calmer second theme introduced by an oboe is after Kiso-bushi from Nagano. The dreamy middle movement is based on the folk songs Aizu Bandaisan (Mount Bandai) from Fukushima and Hietsuki-bushi from Miyazaki. The rhythmic impetus of the finale, a rondo, drives this festive movement to the frenetic ending.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Born in Imperial Russia (today in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine), Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) lived overseas for eighteen years following the Bolshevik Revolution. He left Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in May 1918 by permission of the Soviet authorities and, avoiding western disasters of war, headed east for America via Vladivostok. This four-month voyage let him stop by Japan for two months giving three piano recitals in Yokohama and Tokyo before he reached New York in September 1918. Interestingly, he told his diary what he experienced on the Land of the Rising Sun during the summer.
The globe-trotter composer set to work on the Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1917 before leaving his homeland, continued penning it while traveling, and completed it in the summer of 1921 in France. The same year, he served as the soloist at the world premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the USA. While the Chicagoan audience didn’t receive it enthusiastically, the 1922 successful French premiere in Paris under the baton of his compatriot Sergei Koussevitzky set the work’s unwavering popularity off.
Composer Akira Ifukube (discussed below) wrote that this concerto is “a masterpiece” that “fully demonstrates his [Prokofiev’s] preference for clear lines.” A clarinet duet opens the brief melodious introduction, before the energetic first movement, a sonata, begins to rush like the wind. The middle movement first presents a rather sarcastic theme, which is followed by its five variations. The final movement is a rondo (A–B–A′–C–A″–coda). The rondo (recurrent) theme given by bassoons and strings at the start, is written in the Japanese pentatonic (five-note) Miyako-bushi scale aside from whether the composer intended it or not. And the melody is often said in Japan to be inspired by the country’s traditional music Echigo Jishi (Lion), although the theory remains without foundation. Regardless, the theme makes the piano and orchestra get into a heated discussion without delay, so they can head for the highly determined conclusion in C major.

[Kumiko Nishi]

A herald of Japan’s classical music, Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) beat a path for younger composers such as Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996) and afore-mentioned Yuzo Toyama. Born in the country’s northern island Hokkaido, Ifukube spent his childhood surrounded by folk tunes sung by different settlers and music of the Ainu, the local ingenious population. He took up playing violin before beginning to teach himself composition as a teenager. He would remain self-taught except for about a month of instruction he received in 1936 from Alexander Tcherepnin (whose father Nikolai Tcherepnin taught Prokofiev).
Ifukube’s style is characterized by folk colors and powerful rhythms which he expressed precisely by his skillful orchestration. Also, he often made use of ostinato, technique of repeating persistently a rhythmic and/or melodic pattern. These features are even found in the main theme he wrote for the 1954 movie Godzilla. While the soundtrack has brought his name to wide audience, he composed a number of classical works including Ballata Sinfonica (1943).
Dedicated to the memory of his brother who died in 1942, Ballata Sinfonica consists of two “ballads.” According to Ifukube, ballad is “an ancient form in which dance and music blended into one another.” Both the kaleidoscopic First Ballad and the slow Second Ballad are marked by the economical orchestration (due to the wartime premiere) and the use of pentatonic (five-tone) and hexatonic (six-tone) scales. The work ends disappearing into the silence, reminding us one last time that this is a mourning music.

[Kumiko Nishi]

One of the most remarkable English composers, Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) kept his distance from avant-garde and experimental pursuits unlike Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and John Cage (1912–1992). He instead updated the conventional tonal language relying often on traditional forms, to leave us truly original and important works.
Most notably, he contributed to the revival of English opera, starting with his successful Peter Grimes (1945) followed by The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), Curlew River (1964) and others. Set in an imaginary Suffolk coastal town around 1830, Peter Grimes features a lone-wolf-fisherman, the title role, living in a closed community. The four orchestral interludes, readjusted by Britten for concert as Four Sea Interludes, play important parts in the drama. Born and died himself in port towns in Suffolk, the composer masterfully draws diverse tone-scapes by the North Sea.
Describing a sunrise with the brass, I Dawn hints at Peter’s loneliness with an unquiet melody. During scherzo-like II Sunday Morning, horns and then actual bells evoke the church and the lively town life around it. Slow and static, III Moonlight bridges the scene of the death of Peter’s apprentice who accidentally slides off the cliff into the sea and the scene when the town people accuse missing Peter of murder. Although from Act 1, the hair-raising IV Storm foretells the opera’s tragic ending where Peter, shattered by the incident and losing his mind, drowns himself in his sinking boat.

[Kumiko Nishi]