NHK Symphony Orchestra "Summer" 2023 Unofficial

This year's "NHK Symphony Orchestra Summer" will feature two young talents, both born in the 1990s. Conductor Masaru Kumakura, who worked as an assistant to Paavo Järvi, made his abilities known with a full-scale German program at the replacement performance in November 2020 when the subscription concert was canceled due to the Corona disaster. Tomomiki Kitamura is a pianist of outstanding talent among his contemporaries. His deeply spiritual performances have won him critical acclaim both in Japan and abroad. In this program, they will perform masterpieces of German music.
Weber's "Die Zauberflote" is a representative opera of the German Romanticism. The "Overture," with its mysterious scene of a deep forest and the atmosphere of a hunt, is a masterpiece often performed on its own. Mozart's "Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor," in which Kitamura will serve as soloist, is one of Mozart's only two concertos in a minor key, and is a work of extremely dense emotion. The solo piano part makes full use of improvisational techniques, and I am very much looking forward to seeing how Kitamura will perform it.
Schumann's "Symphony No. 3 'Rhine'" was written in 1850, the year Schumann moved to Dusseldorf, and the work seems to express his cheerful spirit of making a fresh start in a new land. The title "Rhine" was not given by Schumann, but the music is full of charm, evoking various scenes surrounding the majestic Rhine River, the peaceful landscape along the riverbank, the solemn ceremony at the cathedral in Cologne, and the harvest festival in autumn.
(Naoko Murota, music critic)