TOKYO — Though hardly mutual antipodes, more than 4,800 geographical miles separate Japan from Finland. These two overachieving countries were nevertheless linked in two otherwise unrelated concerts in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall Oct. 31 and Nov. 2.
Designed by Nagata Acoustics and opened in 1986, Suntory Hall helped hone the sound-refining skills of Yasuhisa Toyota before he found fame leading the design of Los Angeles’ Disney Hall (2003) and Finland’s Helsinki Music Centre (2011). On Halloween, Suntory’s warm, resonant but transparent acoustic nicely cradled the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (JPO) — led by 85-year-old honorary conductor laureate Ken-ichiro Kobayashi — in a powerful Sibelius Second Symphony. Two days later, it helped showcase the fully able pianism of another octogenarian native son, Finland-based Tateno Izumi, in four left-hand works composed for him by two Finns, an Icelander, and an Argentine.
Founded in 1956 under chief conductor Akeo Watanabe, JPO is one of Japan’s Big Four, along with the Tokyo Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, and Saito Kinen Orchestra. According to the JPO spokesperson Ayako Sugiyama, the orchestra is supported by approximately 200 companies, private grants, and individual donations — but no major sponsors. Four years after Covid, “attendance numbers have almost returned to normal,” Sugiyama said.
Founding music director Watanabe initiated the JPO’s Finland connection with two complete recordings of Sibelius’ symphonies, the first in the 1960s. That connection was deepened by Finn Pietari Inkinen, who recorded a complete Sibelius cycle with the JPO in 2015 and then led them for the next seven years. This orchestra, staffed almost entirely by Japanese, has Finnish cred to spare.
The JPO’s second chief conductor, Kobayashi (known here affectionately as “Koba-ken”), reigned under various titles from 1988 to 2007 until becoming conductor laureate in 2010. His own Sibelius Second credentials include his 1995 recording with the Czech Philharmonic.
Combined with the JPO’s huge yet tight sound and world-class playing, Kobayashi’s firm and dramatic, long-line conception delivered a performance of urgency, polish, and grandeur. Leading without a score, Kobayashi conducted in a legs-planted crouch, fully immersed. The JPO brandished virtuosity everywhere, in the brooding dolor of Hitoshi Suzuki’s bassoon, in Yukiko Sugihara’s plaintive oboe (especially in the third movement), in Keiko Manabe’s keenly floated flute (in the fourth), and in Eric Piekara’s disciplined timpani attack at every call. The JPO’s uniform section strength could be heard in the horns’ ample glow, the woodwinds’ idiosyncratic color, and the strings’ swirling sheen and autumnal timbre.
As Kobayashi steered the orchestra toward the final movement’s massive, fortissimo D major cadence, he pointed his left arm horizon-ward, and with each thematic return traced a slow arc across the orchestra and out into the hall, as if tracking the swan flights that moved Sibelius all his life. Over the top? Maybe, but it perfectly crowned the momentum he’d been carefully building across the work’s 49 minutes. True to national form, the Suntory crowd stayed seated and channeled their approval through a torrent of applause and a bravo or two.
The JPO’s execution of Mozart’s 1779 Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, K. 364, to open the night was faultless: superb ensemble, a robust but always balanced sound, thrilling refinement brought to every bar. Assistant concertmaster Sayaka Chiba and guest principal violist Mari Adachi applied exquisite taste and gentle lyricism to their solo roles, especially in the first-movement cadenza. Principal French horn Takeshi Hidaka played like a national treasure. Though Mozart saw his concertante as a conversation, not a noise-and-effect battle, this listener’s ears favored the JPO ensemble’s side of this sweet dialogue.
A collaborator with the Japan Philharmonic multiple times in his six-decade career, 88-year-old pianist Izumi’s Finnish connection is unique. After a correspondence with a Finnish pen pal in high school led to Izumi’s first visit, he moved there permanently in 1964 and now divides his time between Finland (at Christmas and in summer) and Japan (the rest of the year).
Since Izumi’s first release on Odeon in 1971, the graduate of Japan’s premier music school, Tōkyō Geijutsu Daigaku, has built a formidable catalog of at least 47 recordings. You’ll find Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, and Grieg as well as Japanese composers from Toru Takemitsu and Akira Ifukube to Takashi Yoshimatsu. But Finnish music anchors his catalog, from Sibelius and Rautavaara to lesser-known composers such as Selim Palmgren, Heino Kaski, and Pehr Henrik Nordgren.
While performing Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” in Finland in 2002, Izumi suffered a cerebral hemorrhage onstage that permanently immobilized his right hand. As he recovered, his son left Frank Bridge’s Three Improvisations for the Left Hand lying around, and Izumi took the hint. “I realized that it was possible to achieve full artistic expression with the left hand only,” he told nippon.com in 2019.
The most prominent one-armed pianists in the West were Paul Wittgenstein and Leon Fleisher, the former disabled by war, the latter by focal dystonia. While Fleisher’s commissions were few, Wittgenstein’s comprise a who’s-who of 20th-century composition (Ravel, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Britten, Richard Strauss, Respighi, Korngold, Schmidt, Zemlinsky, etc.). But for sheer volume, Izumi takes the prize: “I’ve collected more than a hundred original works from composers spanning ten countries.”
Four of those commissions were featured in his Nov. 1 recital at Suntory that was billed as Izumi’s “likely last recital at a large venue.” Escorted on and off stage by wheelchair, Izumi quickly overcame any doubts about full functionality with the agility, power, and personality of his playing.
Thordur Magnusson’s five-moment Scenes of Iceland (2013) evocatively communicates five aspects of his homeland’s natural beauty — a waterfall, highlands, northern lights, midnight summer solstice, the Lagarfljót river — through a lovely linking melody. With shimmering ostinatos and occasional dissonances, Magnusson enabled Izumi to display his easy command of the piano’s full range of color.
Finn Pehr Henrik Nordgren’s Kwaidan — inspired by the ghost stories of Japan transplant Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) — was originally composed for and recorded by Izumi before his disability. Before Nordgren’s death in 2008, he composed an additional three Kwaidan ballads (Kwaidan II) for Izumi’s new left-hand requirements. Replete with spectral and dissonant effects, heavy chording, and deft evocations of the Japanese koto, this well-crafted but melodically light music may have tested the audience more than Izumi. He revealed no apparent limit to his ability to precisely control sonority, navigate rapid keyboard runs, or let loose cannonades of pianistic volume.
The ten-minute Egeiro (Resurrection), by the respected Finnish composer and harpsichordist Jukka Tiensuu, tested Izumi in other ways. Beginning with a massive bass-register smash, it required him to command both ends of the keyboard with volume, execute treble-to-bass glissandos, and persuade us that this uncompromisingly jagged, splintering work deserved this moment of sunlight. Such is Izumi’s pianistic charisma that he largely succeeded.
The recital ended with a seven-member wind ensemble, led by Akito Hiraishi, joining Izumi for Argentine Pablo Escande’s Capricci Stravaganti (Unbridled or unconstrained capriccios). Izumi’s commission required Escande to use the same instrumentation as Leoš Janáček’s 1926 Capriccio (composed for another World War I amputee pianist). To fulfill Izumi’s requirement for a piece “filled with the joy of new life, strength, and joy,” Escande crafted a short introduction followed by four capriccio sections, each different in form, character, tempo and instrumentation and each separated by a piano solo/cadenza sharing a recurring theme.
This charmingly accessible music emerged as a kind of concerto for left-hand piano and wind ensemble. The playing — on flute, two trumpets, two trombones, a bass trombone, and Mitsuru Saito’s euphonium — was crisp, ebullient, and seamlessly unified. Escande’s creative, personality-rich writing brilliantly evaded the potential sonic limitations of such a small wind-only band, integrating everything from fanfares, humorously blatting muted trumpets, a heckling flute, the euphonium’s horn-like legato, jazzy syncopations, and a gentle milonga (up-tempo tango). The occasional banal idea notwithstanding, this is a piece deserving wider circulation.
By concert’s end, the fact that Izumi possesses half the physiological equipment of other pianists seemed crudely beside the point. This was not playing that felt limited or incomplete in musicality, sonority, or technique. Responding with sustained warmth (but no standing O), the audience, more numerous and enthusiastic than Friday’s JPO crowd, earned two Izumi encores: Max Bruch student Kōsaku Yamada’s Karatachi no Hana (Karatachi Flowers, arranged by Ryohei Kumamoto) and Akatonbo (Red Dragonfly, arranged by Osamu Kajitani).
