Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2023

This year’s Suntory Hall Summer Festival will take place from 23 – 28 August. Presented by Suntory Hall since 1987, this celebration of contemporary music has become a familiar event in Tokyo’s summer 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.  

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 (Artistic Director: Toshio Hosokawa) 
(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:

The Producer Series: MASAHIRO MIWA 

In this series, each year a different artist or ensemble is invited to curate a series of concerts from their unique point of view. This year’s producer is the Japanese composer Masahiro Miwa, winner of the Suntory Music Award in 2020, and known for his diverse output including works based on the method known as algorithmic composition. He has long been fascinated by gamelan music of Indonesia, and for this festival, he has devised two events through which he explores the universe of gamelan. En-gawa* (25 – 27 August, Blue Rose) is a series of events produced in collaboration with art collective KITA and gamelan group Marga Sari; an imaginary street corner of Indonesia is set up in the Blue Rose where people can stroll around and experience various music and dance performances that will pop up. Meanwhile, the concert Music in the Universe (27 August, Main Hall) will feature José Maceda’s Music for Gongs and Bamboo, as well as world premiere of works for gamelan ensemble by Noriko Koide, Mamoru Fujieda, Makoto Nomura, and Yasuno Miyauchi. 

*En-gawa is a type of veranda in a Japanese traditional house, a space that connects the inside and the outside worlds. 

Theme Composer: OLGA NEUWIRTH (Suntory Hall International Programme for Music Composition No. 45) 

The Theme Composer series presents a portrait of a leading international composer, and commissions a new orchestral work that is premiered during the festival. This year’s theme composer is the celebrated Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968), whose opera Orlando, premiered at the Vienna State Opera in 2019, was the first house commission from a female composer. She is internationally known for the versatility of her musical statements that pushes boundaries in a wide range of forms and genres. She has won numerous awards including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Composition in 2022. 

In the Orchestra Portrait concert (24 August, Main Hall), the commissioned work Orlando’s World, based on her opera, will be premiered by her close colleague Matthias Pintscher (who himself was the Theme Composer in 2021) and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra with mezzo soprano Virpi Räisänen. The programme also includes Neuwirth’s Masaot / Clocks without Hands. In the Chamber Music Portrait, five of her compositions for various instrumentations will be performed by an exciting lineup of Japanese musicians (28 August, Blue Rose). She will also give a Music Composition Workshop with young composers preceded by a talk session with Toshio Hosokawa (23 August, Blue Rose). 

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

The 33rd Competition of Yasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition (26 August, Main Hall) 

This award is presented to the most notable orchestral work by a Japanese composer premiered during the previous year. Following the performance of the three nominated works, the jury (Yasutaki Inamori, Kunitaka Kokaji, and Yukiko Watanabe) will conduct the deliberations on stage in public. This year, orchestral works by Hiroki Tanaka, Junichi Matsumoto, and Wataru Mukai are nominated, which will be performed by the New Japan Philharmonic conducted by Seitaro Ishikawa. There will also be an opportunity for the public to vote for their favourite piece. The concert will open with the world premiere of the commissioned work Falling Leaves Moon Steps (for shakuhachi, shamisen, and orchestra) by Yu Kuwabara, the winner of the 2021 award. 

Text by Nahoko Gotoh 

Full listings of the Summer Festival 2023 can be found at the following: 
https://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/article/detail/001178.html　 

For further information and press photos, please contact: 
suntoryhall-pr@suntory.co.jp 
Public Relations, Suntory Hall 
Website: suntory.jp/HALL-e/ 
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