Ogawa on disc
In the West, To¯ru Takemitsu (193096) is surely Japan’s best-known composer, and Noriko Ogawa has been one of his leading interpreters.
Her 1996 recording Rain Tree (BISCD805) encompasses his complete solo piano works. Ogawa is also the soloist in riverrun, on the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s
A String Around Autumn album of Takemitsu’s concertos (BISCD1300).
Yoshihiro Kanno, born in 1953, describes his language as being based on three distinct worlds: Western instrumental music, Japanese traditional instruments and computer music. His Particle of Piano series was commissioned by Ogawa and was given its premiere on Light, Water, Rainbow (BIS2075), a disc profiling his music.
More widely, Ogawa has made recordings showcasing a whole host of Japanese composers, including Kozaburo Hirai and Makoto Moroi on The Japanese Cello (BISCD876) and Kazuo Yamada and Kikuko Kanai on Bridges to Japan (BISCD1059).
Ogawa has also turned the spotlight on a romanticised Western view of the Far East, in her Japonisme programme drawing together works such as Cyril Scott’s Soirée japonaise, Theodor Szántó’s In
Japan and Albert Ketèlby’s From a Japonese Screen (BISCD1045).
‘We have four rounds. But before that, DVD performances which we all watch. For the tenth Hamamatsu, we received 360 DVDS that qualified. We’re very lucky to be able to accommodate as many as 88 pianists in the first round – the same number as there are keys on a piano!
‘It is just unbelievable, because they can play almost anything they want, and it was such an exciting showcase. But then we had to cut them down to 24 for the second-round recital, which includes a commission from a Japanese composer. And then right down to 12 semi-finalists.
‘The thing is, at every stage when we vote and before the result comes out, the jury members are so nervous! Hands are cold, hearts pounding pretty fast. You see, we vote secretly. And that’s so that when the results are revealed, we don’t know who voted for whom. I have seen some competitions that this kind of whispering could really tip over to one side to another. So discipline is very important.’
Ogawa’s interest in subjectivity of performance is fascinating. Her concern is obviously that any kind of group-think, whether of style, approach or technique, threatens original performance. Everything she says about her competition – surely applicable to any serious contest anywhere – is that the slate is clean when everyone begins. There’s no collective expectation in the jury about what kind of Liszt, Tchaikovsky or Mozart they want to hear. In Hamamatsu, even fashion is considered something of an enemy.
In fact, Ogawa has herself set trends, as a trailblazer for Japanese piano music that has been little-known and littleperformed in the West (see box, p36). ‘It was quite a natural path for me to go strong with this kind of Japanese repertoire, which I still play. There was always more music to record and as a pianist, I needed some kind of project. One recording led to another and then I thought, oh my goodness, there is lots of it. And now I hear that many people want to play it.’
We discuss the opening up of the West that someone of her age, born in the 1960s, has experienced. And Ogawa talks about the way in which her parents’ generation, which experienced the Second World
War at a time when Japan was still an inward-looking society closed to most outsiders, have lived the later part of their lives through their children, who in turn have known a time of expansion, relative openness and tumultuous change inside Japan. It’s true in music as it is in life.
‘Japan has always had music, but of its own kind. And Japanese traditional music, unfortunately, chooses its families. You have to be born into certain families, especially if you look at the Kabuki [a traditional form of dance-drama]. Some simply cannot do it. First of all, the artists are male and they all carry the same last name – father, son and grandson. If you were female and wanted to play music, you couldn’t. Then Western music arrived and just took off. It’s open to everybody. My mother comes from a more Japanese traditional music family, but then she picked up the piano and it took no time for her to get into it.’
Ogawa has a foot in both worlds. Living in London, she is currently working on an Erik Satie recording project on an Erard piano from Satie’s time that she discovered in Paris and is determined to use. Two volumes have already been released, with another in the pipeline for this autumn. At the same time she’s anchored at home in Japan, where the popularity of Western classical music has now enthused two generations of youngsters, and where the old barriers for young musicians have been broken down. Some of them, as Ogawa reminds me, are rather simple ones.
‘For my teacher’s generation, if they travelled they discovered that Japan was like a country of the far, far East. There was no sushi in Europe. They felt kind of isolated and not only because of language, but overall. They felt so lonely that they had to come back to Japan. So many of them didn’t know where to eat. It’s simple things like that. They didn’t know pizza. They didn’t know what a hamburger was. They only ate grilled fish and miso soup.’
A world that has passed, for better or worse. Ogawa is the emblem of the outwardness that her generation was the first to experience. She still records Japanese music, but in the Western tradition where she is entirely and triumphantly at home.
And that is why, in Hamamatsu, she is so determined to continue to attract the best young pianists in the world not just to compete but to play for each other, and to bring these worlds even closer together.
‘Western music arrived in Japan and just took o . Now it’s open to everybody’