Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2020

Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2020 will take place on 22 – 30 August. Initiated in 1987, this annual celebration of contemporary music now forms an important part of Tokyo’s summer music scene. Every August, leading musicians in the field gather at Suntory Hall to present cutting-edge works by an impressive lineup of composers from both Japan and abroad. 

As in previous years, the Summer Festival is formed by three different strands: 

(1) The Producer Series, (2) “Theme Composer” as part of the Suntory Hall International Program for Music Composition series, and (3) Yasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition, an award given to the most outstanding work premiered in Japan in the previous year. This year’s programme is as follows:

(1) The Producer Series:

In this series, each year a different producer is selected to curate a series of contemporary music from his / her unique point of view.  

This year, the series is produced by the doyen of the Japanese contemporary music world, Toshi Ichiyanagi, who first made a name for himself as an avant-garde in 1950s New York. Fittingly, he has titled the series 2020 Tokyo – Avant-garde, an exploration of the role of avant-garde in the 20th and 21st centuries.  

Suntory Hall has commissioned new orchestral works to four leading composers, Akiko Yamane, Kazutomo Yamamoto, Yoichi Sugiyama, and Motoharu Kawashima, who represent the diverse voices of the current Japanese contemporary music scene (26 – 30 August 2020, Main Hall). Meanwhile, the series also looks back at the role of the twentieth-century avant-garde through the music of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Elliott Carter and Yuji Takahashi (22 – 23 August 2020, Blue Rose *Small Hall). The series will conclude with the world premiere of Ichiyanagi’s latest symphony, his eleventh, commissioned by Suntory Hall (30 August 2020, Main Hall). 

Toshi Ichiyanagi (Photo Credit: Koh Okabe)

(2) The Suntory Hall International Program for Music Composition series was inaugurated in 1987 under the supervision of Toru Takemitsu, and each year, it invites a different “Theme Composer” and commissions him / her a new orchestral work that is premiered during the Summer Festival. This year’s theme composer, chosen by the current series director Toshio Hosokawa, is distinguished German composer Isabel Mundry (b.1963), Professor for Composition at the Musikhochschule München; this will be the first time her music will be featured extensively in Japan. Her works take inspirations from various extra-musical references which are woven into a highly individual musical language.  

In the chamber music concert, five of her compositions for diverse ensembles will be performed by an exciting lineup of Japanese musicians (24 August 2020, Blue Rose). In the orchestral concert, the world premiere of Gesture for viola and orchestra (Suntory Hall commission) will be given by the exceptional violist Nils Mönkemeyer with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Wendeberg (28 August 2020, Main Hall). Mundry will also lead a public Composition Workshop with young Japanese composers (25 August 2020, Blue Rose). 

More about the International Program for Music Composition here:
http://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/global/composers/numano.html

Isabel Mundry (Photo Credit: Martina Pipprich)

(3) The third strand of the Summer Festival is theYasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition (29 August 2020, Main Hall). Founded in honour of the composer Yasushi Akutagawa in 1990, the award is given to the most notable orchestral work premiered during the previous year. Following the performance of the three shortlisted works, the judging process is held on stage in public. The winner receives JPY1,500,000 as well as a commission for a new orchestral work to be performed in 2022.  

The works of this year’s three finalists, Yujiro Ariyoshi, Kenta Onoda, and Noeru Hiyamizu, will be performed by Ryusuke Numajiri and the New Japan Philharmonic, preceded by the world premiere of the new work by Naoki Sakata, winner in 2018. On the jury are Hitomi Kaneko, Tomoko Fukui, and Misato Mochizuki, and the on-stage deliberations will be chaired by Professor Seiji Choki of Tokyo University. 

Listings of the Summer Festival 2020 can be found at the following: 

‘The Producer Series: Toshi Ichiyanagi’
https://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/schedule/detail/20200822_S_3.html

‘Suntory Hall International Program for Music Composition’
https://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/schedule/detail/20200824_S_3.html

‘Yasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition’
https://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/schedule/detail/20200829_M_2.html

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Text credit: Nahoko Gotoh, Music journalist