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A Memorial in Music
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20159 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,523 Words |
| Author
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
To be invited to perform at Carnegie Hall is an achievement of the greatest distinction in the Western musical world. To arrive at Carnegie Hall in the company of violinist Isaac Stern and conductor Seiji Ozawa is to come in the company of two of the most prominent musicians of our era. And to be invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, with Seiji Ozawa and Isaac Stern, at the inaugural concert of the hall's second century of music making is to have reached the summit. The Saito Kinen Orchestra of Tokyo did just that last September, with a capacity audience to welcome them in their North American debut. But the person whose triumph it really was--Japanese teacher/musician Hideo Saito, after whom the orchestra is named--wasn't even there; he died in 1974.
Saito was the most important figure in the introduction of Western music into Japan. Little known outside his homeland, Saito was born to a wealthy scholarly family in 1902; his father, an authority on English literature, compiled the standard Japanese-English dictionary. A gifted cellist, Saito entered the Leipzig Hochschule fur Musik and later studied with the legendary Emanual Feuermann in Berlin. After returning to Japan, he was determined to prove that Japanese players could not only perform Western music well, but could also bring special sensitivity and insight to it.
In 1948, using rooms in a bombed-out girls' school, he formed an orchestra of children aged five to eleven. This was a radical idea at the time, but was close to the thinking of Saito's friend and colleague Shinichi Suzuki, who achieved such wonders with children. A man of boundless energy and fierce temper, Saito taught and threatened, coached and cajoled, and formed an outstanding ensemble. He gradually extended his activities to found a high school in 1952, which expanded to a two-year college in 1955 and finally, in 1961, a four-year college, the Toho Gakuen School of Music--based in a Tokyo suburb and one of the country's most distinguished conservatories. The school orchestra, under Saito's direction, toured the United States in 1964, and then Europe and the U.S.S.R. in 1970.
Saito remained active as a teacher and conductor until the very end of his life. Ten years later, students and associates decided to give a series of concerts in his honor, as a living memorial (the word kinen--as in Saito Kinen--can mean tribute or society of friends). Among them was Seiji Ozawa, who had his earliest training under Saito and considers him the dominant influence on his musical thinking. Ozawa made the ensemble one of his pet projects. Under Ozawa and conductor Kazuyoshi Akiyama, another graduate of the
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