Making his Riga debut is the principal viola of the Munich Philharmonic, Jano Lisboa – we will hear him as soloist in the Japanese master Toru Takemitsu’s viola concerto, which, shimmering and glinting in impressionist style, speaks of silence, simplicity and a string that twines itself around autumn. Beside it stands Beethoven’s Fourth, which many will single out as the most endearing of the untameable Viennese lion’s symphonies, and Schubert’s “Unfinished”, whose fame has been forged as much by the music’s own allure as by the legends about why it was left incomplete.
Conductor Junichi Hirokami (b. 1958) is celebrated for his strikingly supple, almost dance-like manner on the podium. Western critics say as much, and Hirokami himself is said not to mind. In a 1993 interview the conductor, then only 35, recalled that he had wanted to conduct from the very start of his musical training: “I really do like moving my arms; I felt I had a natural gift for expressing myself through the body. Of course, the study of scores and the analysis of musical structure come later – but before that, if, while listening to music, you feel that the music itself makes you want to move in a certain way, it shows that you have the natural conducting talent that matters so much.”
Hirokami’s parents were opposed to their son becoming a musician, since a musician can never be certain of tomorrow. He was an only child, and tradition holds that an only child – a boy above all – should go into business. It was around that time (the 1960s, then) that people in Japan were beginning to take an interest in Western classical music.
For Hirokami, the guiding feeling in music is: never give up! However tired or anxious you are, you must press on and work to the very best of your ability.
Incidentally, it is said that Seiji Ozawa regards Junichi Hirokami as, in a sense, the heir to his own artistic path.
Jano LISBOA – viola