Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2022

This year’s Suntory Hall Summer Festival will take place on 21 – 28 August 2022. Initiated in 1987, the festival is an important annual event not only for Suntory Hall, but also for Tokyo’s active contemporary music scene. 

Image Courtesy of Suntory Hall

Every August, leading musicians in the field from both Japan and abroad gather in Tokyo to present the cutting-edge music of our age. As in previous years, the Summer Festival is formed of three different strands: (1) “The Producer Series”, (2) “Theme Composer” as part of the Suntory Hall International Programme for Music Composition, 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: Klangforum Wien 

In this series, each year a different artist/ensemble is invited to curate a series of concerts from his/her/their unique point of view. Following the success of Ensemble Intercontemporain last summer, this year’s producer is another highly regarded contemporary music ensemble from Europe, the Klangforum Wien. Since its foundation in 1985, the Vienna-based group is known for “exploring new horizons of artistic creativity together with the most important composers of our time”. 

Klangforum Wien will produce and perform four varied concerts, two in the Main Hall and two in the Blue Rose (Small Hall). To celebrate the centenary of the birth of the visionary composer Iannis Xenaxis (1922-2001), they will perform his rarely heard ballet music Kraanerg, conducted by Emilio Pomàrico (26 August, Main Hall). The orchestral concert (22 August, Main Hall) will include Japanese premieres of works by Johannes Maria Staud, Eiko Tsukamoto, and Georg Friedrich Haas. In the Blue Rose, they will present two Viennese-themed chamber music concerts: Family Tree of Klangforum (24 August) which features several composers with whom they have had strong connections including Beat Furrer, Friedrich Cerha, and Olga Neuwirth, and Das neue Wien (25 August), in which they will look back at well-known works by Schoenberg, Berg, and Mahler through chamber ensemble arrangements. 

2. Theme Composer: Isabel Mundry (Suntory Hall International Programme for Music Composition No. 44) 

The Theme Composer series presents a portrait of a leading international composer, and commissions him/her a new orchestral work that is premiered during the festival. This year’s theme composer, postponed from 2020, is 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 Tokyo. Her works take inspirations from various extra-musical references which are woven into a highly individual musical language. In the Chamber Music Portrait, five of her compositions for diverse ensembles will be performed by an exciting lineup of Japanese musicians (24 August, Blue Rose). In the Orchestra Portrait concert, the world premiere of Gesture for viola and orchestra (co-commissioned by Suntory Hall and Bayerischer Rundfunk/musica viva) will be given by the exceptional violist Nils Mönkemeyer with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Wendeberg (28 August, Main Hall). 

Mundry will also lead a public Music Composition Workshop with young Japanese composers (21 August, Blue Rose). 

Please click the following link to learn more about the International Programme for Music Composition: http://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/global/composers/numano.html 

3. The 32nd Yasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition (28 August, Main Hall) 

This award is presented to the most notable orchestral work by a Japanese composer premiered during the previous year (January-December 2021). Following the performance of the three nominated works, the jury (Kenji Sakai, Norio Fukushi, and Akiko Yamane) will conduct the deliberations on stage in public. This year, the works of Makoto Ohata, Kohsuke Negishi, and Yuya Haryu are nominated. They will be performed by the New Japan Philharmonic conducted by Yoichi Sugiyama. The concert will be preceded by the world premiere of the new work for two pianos and orchestra by Kenta Onoda, the winner of the 2020 award. There will also be an opportunity for the public to vote for their favourite piece. 

Please click the following link to learn more about The 32nd Yasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition: https://www.suntory.com/news/article/sfa0051E.html 

Full listings of the Summer Festival 2022 can be found at the following: 
https://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/article/detail/000889.html 

Text by Nahoko Gotoh