Tokyo -- Last night, in a country crazy for both baseball and classical music, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and David Zinman hit one into the cheap seats.
In their first concert in Tokyo's Suntory Hall, Japan's premier venue for symphonic music, the BSO and its music director won the hearts of a sophisticated audience with a program of Dvorak, Barber and Brahms. Audiences in this polite and reserved nation do not give standing ovations, but there was no mistaking the warmth with which the audience received the orchestra, the way it demanded curtain calls and how it was touched by the BSO's third and final encore -- an orchestral arrangement of the beloved Japanese folk song "Kojo no Tsuki" ("The Moon Over the Castle") by BSO bassist Jonathan Jensen.
"People will be scurrying to their maps to figure out where Baltimore is -- that it can have such a great orchestra," said Masa Kajimoto, chairman of Kajimoto Concert Management Co., who planned the BSO's three-week tour of Japan.
The musicians, who are usually their own toughest critics, couldn't have been happier.
"That was fun, man," said BSO trumpet player Langston Fitzgerald, striking the exhilarated note heard everywhere after the players put an end to the audience's applause by following music director Zinman off the stage.
Although lively ticket sales for its concerts indicate that the BSO's tour of Japan, with 11 days remaining, could already be called successful, the orchestra needed to triumph in Suntory Hall, where it will perform again Friday and Sunday, to put an emphatic period on that success.
"It's the same as coming into New York and playing Carnegie -- it's indisputably the most prestigious hall in the music capital of the Far East," said Byron Gustafson, vice president for touring of ICM, the New York agency that helped arrange the BSO's tour.
Suntory's significance is further heightened by this: On Friday, the BSO will perform not only for those in attendance at the hall, but for a live telecast in Japan plus a Maryland Public Television taping for the audience back home.
Despite Suntory's similarities to Carnegie and other great halls in the West that challenge visiting orchestras to prove themselves, important differences separate these venues. The differences point to deeper ones between East and West -- to the ways in which classical music is perceived and to the cultures and societies it serves.
Put simply, concert halls in the West tend to serve abstractions, whether exalting High Art, celebrating heroic figures or preserving the integrity of the city by saving its downtown from urban blight and suburban flight. Concert halls in the East tend to have a smaller, more human scale and attempt to serve groups -- whether a business and its workers or the social unit of a neighborhood -- rather than individuals or social abstractions.
The most important concert halls in the West were built in the 19th century and gradually acquired their status as hallowed ground through their association with great composers and their works as much as through their acoustic excellence. Suntory Hall -- which takes its name from the corporation that is Japan's largest manufacturer of whiskey, beer and wine, and that built and operates the hall -- opened its doors in Tokyo's Akasaka district only eight years ago.
It joined more than a dozen halls in other Tokyo neighborhoods that already presented symphony concerts and has been succeeded by several other new halls. That there are so many halls in Tokyo, instead of just one or two important ones, points not only to the eager consumption of classical music here, but also to the different assumptions that Westerners and the Japanese have about the function of buildings in a city.
While buildings may be torn down in the West, they are often put up with a view to their immortality and sometimes come to be regarded with veneration. It was such veneration that preserved Carnegie Hall from the wrecker's ball in 1961 after the completion of the new concert hall at Lincoln Center that was supposed to have made the older hall obsolete.
In the Far East (and in Tokyo particularly), another attitude prevails -- one that results in continually pulling down and putting bTC up. That is why Tokyo is perpetually under construction. If the Western city in its architectural style -- think of the soaring spires of Gothic architecture -- often strives for the more-than-human, the Eastern city is more of ten satisfied with the merely human.
In a culture pervaded by the influence of Buddhism, impermanence is seen as the natural state of the human race, and transience is the prime quality of life. To Japanese music lovers, Suntory is only a landmark in that it tells them something about their progress down the never-to-be-completed road of life.
"You must remember that Western music came to Japan only a little more than 100 years ago," said Akira Watakabe, who helped plan Suntory Hall and has been its general manager since it opened. "Before Suntory Hall, there was not a single true concert hall in Japan designed specifically for symphonic music. When this hall was built, it told us that we were no longer quite so far behind the West."
The hall was the pet project of Suntory Corp.'s music-loving chairman, Keiko Saji. The commitment to build it was made in 1983 to celebrate the company's 60th year of whiskey production and 20th anniversary of brewing activities. Mr. Saji's devotion to the Berlin Philharmonic, the hall it plays in (the Philharmonie) and its late music director (Herbert von Karajan) led to frequent trips by Suntory staff to consult with von Karajan and other Berlin Philharmonic officials. The result is a hall that resembles the Philharmonie (it has a similar behind-the-stage seating arrangement) without the Berlin hall's acoustical flaws.
If the hall is an adaptation of a German design that -- like so many Japanese products -- is better than the original, Suntory also succeeds in expressing two of Japanese culture's defining characteristics.
One is the celebration of business corporations. It is hard to think of a single case in the United States -- even with the tax incentives that encourage corporate participation in the arts that American businesses possess and that Japanese businesses don't -- in which a corporation not only donated a $100 million theater to a city, but also continued to maintain it.
By American business standards, the Suntory Corp.'s costly identification with Japan's finest hall seems quaint, not least in the way Suntory uses elements of the hall's decor to celebrate features of the company's products. The terraced seating is intended to suggest Suntory's terraced vineyards; the crystal chandeliers are designed to evoke the bubbles in its effervescent beverages; and the white oak paneling is the same as the wood used in its storage caskets.
The hall also expresses another characteristically Japanese tendency: this country's predilection for seeing itself as a homogenous nation in which the harmoniousness of society -- unlike the United States, which is increasingly torn apart by the demands of diversity -- is more important than the self-realization of individual parts. By turning one's head in Suntory, most people in the audience can -- as audiences seated in American halls rarely can -- see almost all the other members of the audience without obstruction.
Even the pair of seats reserved for Suntory's Mr. Saji and his wife, and the box for Japan's emperor and empress, while privileged in position, are easily visible and fit unobtrusively into the whole. The wide, free-standing staircases that lead into the hall, and the spacious carpeted foyer between them, allow concertgoers to enjoy the pleasure of watching the movement of other members of the audience.
The human dimension of the hall leads to yet another distinction from American concert halls. In the United States, concert halls are often built without regard to where much of their audience lives and works. Although most BSO patrons had moved to the suburbs by the time the Meyerhoff was completed in 1982, for example, it was nevertheless located downtown in an area that most concertgoers rarely have a reason to visit. The orchestra's management might say that it stays downtown to keep the city from becoming an empty shell; the Japanese, with their characteristic emphasis on the transience of things, would not hesitate in rebuilding in the suburbs what is important to the city.
If Suntory's audience is the richest in the city, that is because it is located in Akasaka, the business district in which many of Tokyo's most affluent citizens work. The 7 p.m. concert time standard in Japan, unlike the 8 or 8:15 p.m. curtain at most American concert halls, makes it convenient for people who work in Akasaka to leave the office, have a light meal at one of the district's many restaurants, and attend a concert before going home.
Tokyo, with its 12 million-plus population, is really a collection of neighborhoods, and the city's other concert halls are designed to serve their different constituencies. Bunkamura Orchard Hall, for example, is located in the Shibuya district, which is typically filled with young people; the hall attracts audiences that are mostly in their late teens and 20s. The Uena district's Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, which is housed in a complex that includes the central station of one of the most commonly used commuter train lines, serves an audience that -- because it is less affluent than Suntory's -- must commute long distances to and from work.
In Japan, one is always aware of hierarchy and, in terms of Tokyo's many concert halls, Suntory stands unquestionably at the top of the mountain. But it is a mountain that seems to have a place for everyone -- even if all they share is Japanese identity and an interest in classical music. In Japan, that interest is so strong one would not be surprised to find that Tokyo could fill even more concert halls than it does.