Yasunshi Akutagawa Memorial Orchestra Nipponica

　The 44th concert of Orchestra Nipponica titled "Music of the European Frontier and Beyond" is a concert of masterpieces rarely heard in concert. The four pieces are said to be representative of each composer.
　Bartók's "Dance Suite" is well known worldwide, and Akira Ogura's "Dance Suite for Orchestra," which was strongly influenced by Bartók, has been performed frequently. In recent years, conductor Eiji Oue has featured it in concerts such as the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra (2011) and the subscription concert of the Daihir (2016). However, this is the first time in 46 years that Akira Ogura's "Violin Concerto," defined by the thinker Shuichi Kato as "emotion in form," has been performed with orchestra accompaniment. In addition, Yoshio Mamiya's "Two Tableaux for Orchestra '65," a work that Mamiya himself describes as his masterpiece, was composed after he was strongly influenced by Bartók, when he arrived at the idea of "music that thinks with the soles of its feet. This will be the first time in 28 years that Mamiya will perform the work again.
　We are looking forward to seeing how conductor Ichiro Nohira will conduct this masterpiece by Bartók and Mamiya, his own compositional mentor.
　Also, Kazuhiro Takagi, a highly acclaimed virtuoso, will perform Ogura's "Violin Concerto. Takagi has served as concertmaster of major orchestras in Japan and abroad, and has been concertmaster of Orchestra Nipponica for more than 15 years. As you may know, his performance of the "Violin Concerto" by Yutaka Ohguri in the Naxos "Selected Japanese Composers Series" has been highly acclaimed in specialist magazines.
　Bartók, who was on the periphery of European musical culture, created fascinating music with the Magyar's historical, cultural, and vernacular background as the basis of his creation, while establishing a new technical basis of composition appropriate to the 20th century. Japanese composers on the Asian frontier took up the challenge of creating music from their own perspective.
　Today, when traditions rooted in the local climate are being undermined by narrow nationalistic values and can be a source of mutual prejudice, the achievements of these two composers, Ogura and Mamiya, must be reevaluated from a new perspective. We look forward to seeing you at the concert.