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NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo

Programme

Tōru Takemitsu: Three Film Scores
Alban Berg: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra “To the Memory of an Angel”
Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E minor Op. 98

Performers

NHK Symphony Orchestra
Fabio Luisi - conductor
Akiko Suwanai - violin

Buy tickets

750 - 2100 CZK

15 . 5 . 2025

Thursday 20.00

Rudolfinum – Dvořák Hall

Blossoming of Prague Spring

The NHK Symphony Orchestra, a broadcast orchestra affiliated to Japanese radio and television, prides itself on its reputation as the finest orchestra in Asia with a tradition spanning almost one hundred years, incorporating concerts with the likes of Herbert von Karajan, Igor Stravinsky and Lovro von Matačić. The orchestra has likewise been headed by such illustrious figures as Herbert Blomstedt, Wolfgang Sawallisch, André Previn and Paavo Järvi. All of them have shaped the sound of an ensemble whose performance was described by the British daily The Guardian as “fabulously disciplined, crisp and purposeful, and yet also expressive…” The NHK Symphony Orchestra will appear at the Prague Spring with its current Chief Conductor Fabio Luisi, joining violinist Akiko Suwanai in a programme uniting the music of Johannes Brahms, Alban Berg and a classic of Japanese composition, Tōru Takemitsu.

“I try to create something new that does not exist,” stated Fabio Luisi in an interview. A native of Genoa, Luisi has headed the NHK Symphony Orchestra since the 2022–2023 season. His inaugural concert earned a standing ovation: “It was an outstanding performance, and certainly the most immaculate of all the Verdi Requiems I’ve heard,” was the enthusiastic response from the bachtrack.com website critic Nahoko Gotoh. The exceptionally talented artist, who has a passion not only for music but also for fragrances, producing his own line of perfumes, is a seasoned globetrotter. In addition to his commitments in Japan, he also holds the posts of Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. He regularly appears with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where he was engaged as Principal Conductor in the years 2011–2017. Winner of a Grammy Award for his live recording of the last two parts of Richard Wagner’s celebrated tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen for Deutsche Grammophon, the maestro returns to the Prague Spring after an absence of thirty-five years!

“The first notes impress with a magnitude of sound, the depth of dense and dark timbre throughout the registers.” The words of a critic on the classictoulouse.fr website describing his impressions from a concert given by violinist Akiko Suwanai. While she was still a teenager she was bringing home awards from major international competitions: she earned second place in the “Premio Paganini” International Violin Competition in Genoa and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, and in 1990 she was the outright winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Since that time she has been one of the world’s most sought-after violinists, appreciated by audiences and critics alike. She has worked with distinguished conducting names of the 21^stcentury, such as Seiji Ozawa, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Sir Antonio Pappano, Myung-Whun Chung and Daniele Gatti. Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, which she will be performing at the Prague Spring, features regularly on her international concert programmes. One of her most fêted performances of this work occurred in front of television cameras at the Salzburg Festival, where she was accompanied by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester under Pierre Boulez. The New York Times wrote back then: “The violinist played with supple beauty and authority in Berg’s final completed work.” Austrian composer Alban Berg (1885–1935) wrote his concerto in 1935 in memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and architect Walter Gropius, who died of polio at the age of eighteen. In his exceptionally poignant work, which Berg subtitled “To the Memory of an Angel”, he combined elements of dodecaphony and tonality, incorporating quotations from the cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort BWV 60 by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) also quotes a Bach cantata in his Symphony No. 4 in E minor Op. 98, a passage which contains a musical setting of the text: “All my days which pass in suffering God ends at last in joy.” The composer wrote his last symphony in the quiet town of Mürzzuschlag in the Austrian Alps. Despite the beautiful surroundings and his auspicious situation in life, here, in 1884, he produced one of the darkest and most portentous works of the genre, with the exception of the radiant, energetic third movement, which Brahms’s friend and first biographer Max Kalbeck linked with a quotation from Goethe: “The greatest pleasure is most tempting only when it presses close to danger and enjoys the pleasantly fearful, sweet sensations in its vicinity.”

Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996) is regarded as the most important Japanese composer of the 20^th century. His oeuvre blends the influence of Japanese traditional music, European conventions and the avant-garde. One of his lifelong passions was film; he wrote the music for more than one hundred films, including the classic drama Ran by director Akira Kurosawa. “I don’t like things that are too pure and refined. I’m more interested in what’s real. And films are so full of life,” Takemitsu once remarked. At the Prague Spring you will hear the NHK Symphony Orchestra performing his Three Film Scores for string orchestra, in which he draws on his music for the films José Torres, about the life of the famous American boxer, Kuroi Ame (Black Rain) and Tanin no kao (The Face of Another). This sublime Prague Spring concert will thus open with wonderfully vivid compositions, which build incredible suspense, play with our imagination, touch our dreams, and reflect the influence of American music on Takemitsu’s work.