The Vienna Philharmonic is in the United States this month, performing in New York and Florida under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. As a New Yorker who attends concerts on a regular basis, I never miss a chance to hear the orchestra’s performances at Carnegie Hall. Two years ago I even had the opportunity to attend a concert in Tokyo—a unique experience to hear a familiar orchestra in a hall new to me.
I have always been aware of the long attraction in Japan to Western classical music. The country has produced outstanding conductors and performance artists as well as composers. Among the latter, Toru Takemitsu, who first heard popular music on records during World War II, never composed without first playing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on the piano. This appreciation of classical music emerged during the Meiji period, and it supplanted Japanese music in public schools as early as 1872.
With this knowledge in hand, I made my way to the 30-year-old Suntory Hall, the main concert venue of Tokyo, where the Vienna Philharmonic would be performing and where seven out of the nine local orchestras hold their subscription series.
Seeing no grand entrance at street level, I walked up an open stairway onto Karajan Platz at the center of a major office/residential complex known as ARK Hills (an acronym of the area districts). And there recessed under a low roof-cum-canopy were the glass doors to Suntory Hall’s invitingly warm-toned foyer of mahogany and marble with staircases and an escalator to the upper level. Designed by Shoichi Sano of Yasui Architects with two-thirds of the building below grade, the main concert hall itself, influenced personally by Herbert von Karajan of the Berlin Philharmoniker (hence the plaza), is in the vineyard design originally developed by Hans Scharoun for Berlin’s Philharmonie in 1963, and that since has spread all over the world. With the orchestra placed at the center surrounded by individual balconies rising at different levels, the visual reference in Japan is more akin to the pattern of ascending rice terraces throughout the countryside.
Tokyo’s Suntory Hall [Flickr user Nokton (CC BY-NC 2.0)]
Early on, classical music performances in Japan were regarded as too rarefied and academic to be accompanied by alcoholic refreshments, though later saki was permitted. But Suntory, the leading company of both alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, being the donor of the hall, changed the social ambience, and attractive bars are located throughout, with white oak walls, the same material used as casks for aging liquors and wines. With a best-dressed audience greeting and bowing to friends, there was a festive air in anticipation of the concert.
I took my seat in one of the balconies with a perfect view of the platform as the musicians filed in to roaring applause, followed by their guest conductor Zubin Mehta (the Vienna Philharmonic, a self-governing orchestra, has no permanent music director). Opening with Brahms’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D minor, op. 15, with pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, the orchestra played with the usual precision and fully articulated sound for which it is noted. Buchbinder, brought back for a solo encore, played Alfred Grünfeld’s Soirée de Vienne, op. 56, a concert paraphrase of Johann Strauss II’s waltz motifs from Die Fledermaus, which put the audience into a frenzy of pleasure.
Featuring French composers, the second half opened with Claude Debussy’s mellow La Mer: Trois esquisses symphoniques followed by Maurice Ravel’s La Valse with its rapturous finale. And as is the Vienna Philharmonic’s custom, encore follows encore with its signature waltzes or polkas; here Tchaikovsky’s waltz from Swan Lake, followed by Strauss’s Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka. Nothing was restrained about this audience with overflowing enthusiasm, and as at Carnegie Hall, people practically danced out into the corridors.
As expected, the acoustics are superb in Suntory Hall with its series of trigonal pyramids lining the sidewalls of white oak and a vaulted ceiling that also reflects sound, along with plush burgundy seats backed with oak. As a small detail, looking up, I noted that the 10 hanging glass light fixtures had a bubbly appearance with end pieces that resemble lotus seed pods, a very recognizable form in Japan. A smaller hall in the building, also in wood, features chamber music and a range of experimental performances.
At the reception following the performance, I spoke with several orchestra members, in particular Michael Bladerer, a double-bass player, who commented that with the special acoustics in the hall he can hear the other instruments in the orchestra especially clearly. Following the Vienna’s concerts, Bladerer, who has learned Japanese, and other orchestra members traveled in a joint program with Suntory Hall to teach music lessons to school children and play concerts with school orchestras in areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. In essence then, like its partner Carnegie Hall, Suntory has become an international crossroad for the dissemination of classical music as integral to Japanese culture.
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My next destination was an art festival that takes place on 12 islands in the Seto Inland Sea called the Setouchi Triennale (named after a city on the mainland). Traveling cross-country in Japan on a shinkansen or bullet train from Tokyo is always an event in itself. As I looked out the window, rice paddies whizzed by in alternation with villages and occasional cities. At Okayama, I switched to the Marine Liner, a train that skirts around the Inland Sea on a high bridge to the port city of Takamatsu with views over myriad islands, 3,000 in total, with many inhabited. The Inland Sea lies between three of Japan’s main islands: Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu.
Not the usual art festival, the Triennale, first mounted in 2010, originated with a movement spearheaded to counteract the changing lifestyles on the islands as their populations dwindled. Young people were moving to the cities, leaving the elderly behind to cope in the villages. Earlier, during the past 25 years, the Benesse Art Site Naoshima project commissioned work from contemporary artists and architects on three islands—Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima—that brought new fame to the region and improved its economy. This pattern has been enlarged by a Triennale that sponsors art installations spread over additional islands. While new projects are created by artists for each festival, earlier ones remain and have even been embellished, several making use of now-abandoned buildings and village houses.
When I arrived in Takamatsu for my two-day excursion, I selected two islands to visit and checked the schedules for the ferryboats that connect them to the mainland. (Buses on the islands transported visitors between villages and projects.) Being a holiday weekend, the boats were jammed, but when I eyed a bench on the boat to Megijima, I signaled politely to a young Japanese woman at the other end, who promptly responded in English, “Sit down, and join us.” A high school English teacher from nearby Kochi, she was with her husband, a history teacher, and two young sons. We compared notes about the projects to see on the island and decided to join forces. As the boat plowed across the sea, the islands gave the appearance of a series of distant mountain ranges until closer up, water separated one from the other.
Once we landed, we headed straight for the Ogre’s Caves at the mountaintop. Megijima, originally called Onigashima (island of ogres), was the legendary site of the famous folk tale about Momotaro, the Peach Boy, born from a peach and raised by an old couple. He grew up strong and brave and set off with three trusted companions—a dog, a monkey and a pheasant—to conquer the ogres, who lived on the island and pillaged the mainland. Walking through the cave, a former mine, was like being in the illustrated fairytale, especially with two boys taking it all in. One of the exhibits displayed ornamental tiles in the shape of fierce ogre masks with horns and fangs, a local specialty, made by 3,000 schoolchildren. And in another niche, a standing bright blue ogre (they come in colors) was holding forth with broken trees and collaged elements of wood and metal dripping in colors as conceived by Chaos Lounge, a Japan-based artists group.
Coming down the mountain along woodland pathways edged with wildflowers with views of the sea, we arrived in one of the villages at a defunct elementary school that had become an elaborate art project, MECON, by the artist Shinro Ohtake. The school’s entrance, now painted lime green with an orange metal canopy over a mixed-tiled surface, led to a courtyard, its centerpiece a tall palm tree sprouting out of a bright red-orange buoy, like a rocket launch. To the side was a high wall covered with a miscellany of junkyard objects, interspersed with neon light and Plexiglas—every item no doubt had a memory attached to it. Tree roots binding it all together are said to be symbolic of its name, Me for Megijimas and Con for root, implying that the island people should keep their roots.
By the time we saw more exhibits—inspired bonsai in a traditional house and walls of open ceramic blocks with cheese-stick-like rungs inside—we had missed the first boat back, but luckily not the second, else one is stranded. I was careful then the following morning to arrive early for the ferry to Teshima, one of the most popular islands with several Benesse projects on it. When we landed, I ran for the first bus to the Teshima Art Museum, the main purpose of the day. I dismounted and was frozen in a moment of exquisite beauty when time appears to stand still. Standing high up over the blue sea with rice terraces ready for harvesting rising above me, I looked down below on a shallow ellipse of white concrete nestled into a rice terrace that is the Teshima Art Museum, designed by Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA.
Teshima Art Museum, from the outside. [Noboru Morikawa]
Rather than approaching it directly, visitors are guided to a woodland promenade around adjacent Mount Myojin as a contemplative preparation for the experience. The interior, totally empty with two oval cutouts above open to the sky and the elements—and bird song—houses just one artwork: Matrix by Rei Naito. It consists of droplets of water rising up periodically from the concrete floor and traveling along their own trajectory, sometimes meeting up with other droplets to form a stream and eventually a pool. It is mesmerizing and Zen-like over the slow passage of time.
While the art projects are the raison d’être of the Triennale, equally engaging for me were the villages themselves, totally intact, especially Karato-oka on Teshima, where the bus left me off next. Set close together along narrow winding streets, the wooden houses with weathered slated walls and two-tiered, gray-tiled roofs had a cozy yet utilitarian quality. Several were elevated above stone walls enclosing clipped hedges or vegetable and flower gardens, with a profusion of zinnias, purple fireweed, black-eyed susans, and cosmos. Persimmons hanging from trees were ripe and glowing in a deep orange.
One of these houses, now vacant, was actually the site for an art project called Storm House, created by Canadian sound artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and I was immediately drawn to it for the experience of being inside. In essence, sitting shoeless on tatami mats facing the exterior through shoji screens, one heard a distant rumbling of a thunderstorm quickly approaching (a sensation I know all too well from nights in my summer log cabin on coastal Maine). Soon the storm at its peak—pouring rain, loud claps of thunder and simultaneous lightning—is right overhead with scattered pails about to catch leaks adding to the reality. And then it slowly ebbs away back into the distance. It was a stunning 10-minute performance that gave the sensation of living there.
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Back in Tokyo, I stopped for tea with a friend at SunnyHills, a tea shop in the chic Minami-Aoyama district designed by the architect Kengo Kuma with an exterior grid of crisscrossed slats of Japanese cypress that resembles a giant, three-story basket on the corner of a residential street. With sunlight streaming into the interior, the patterns are repeated in shadows, and the walls inside are more of the same, diamond-shaped lattices of wood constructed without glue or nails. Stair treads of uneven length are flanked on one side by massive greenery. Seated at long plank tables, guests drink complimentary oolong tea with SunnyHills’s trademark pineapple cakes, a cubic rectangle of cookie-type crust with a dark jam-like pineapple filling. Their wooden appearance inspired the architect’s design. Few leave the shop without purchasing a box of the popular cakes to take home.
Lunch followed before my flight at the nearby Aoyama Flower Market Tea House, combining two of Japan’s greatest arts, flower arranging and tea, to say nothing of the salads. Behind the thriving florist shop in front is the restaurant, a green bower with glass tables separated by floral arrangements. “Today’s Flower” was the dahlia, and they were all over in the decor, every kind and color imaginable, a veritable symphony of fresh dahlias—in a country of music and art.
Paula Deitz is editor of the Hudson Review.
