In Wednesday’s (2/19) Japan Times, Chiho Iuchi writes, “The Sony Music Foundation took the opportunity of the New York Philharmonic’s current Asia tour to organize a special event on Feb. 11. The concert aimed to provide Japanese youth—some of whom were from Fukushima Prefecture—with first-class live performances by a top-rate orchestra. Fukushima is still recovering from the Great East Japan Earthquake, which struck on March 11, 2011. The night began with Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,’ led by assistant conductor Joshua Weilerstein and narrated in Japanese by music director Alan Gilbert, whose mother, Philharmonic violinist Yoko Takebe, is from Japan. This led into a special feature, ‘Music for Fukushima,’ which comprised short pieces composed by students between the ages of 10 and 15, and is the result of an ongoing project between Fukushima and New York youth. The Japanese pieces were written by students studying composition under professor Takehito Shimazu of Fukushima University.… Inspired by these compositions, the New York-based students of the Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program wrote their own compositions in response, resulting in a symphonic back-and-forth.” The current issue of Symphony reports on several young-composer projects, including the New York Philharmonic’s.
Posted February 19, 2014
