The Tokyo Concert Experience

  A brief take on the August 22 concert. It was the first one of an oddly timed tour of Japan just a couple of weeks after the end of the Olympics in the midst of the higher number of daily corona cases this country has experienced yet. The date was at Suntory Hall and the first thing that caught my attention was the laid-back approach at the entrance. No temperature taken, didn’t see lots of hand sanitizers either. Sorry for the grumpiness but that approach put me in a not so great mood from the get-go. It might have been one of the reasons why I didn’t particularly enjoyed this concert. I was pumped to see the legendary group founded by Boulez in the seventies, whose recordings of pieces by Ligeti and Berio I’ve enjoyed through the years. The program also looked quite interesting. A chamber opera by Toshio Hosokawa (I’m not kidding when I said that at least one of his pieces have been performed in every single contemporary music concert I’ve been to in Tokyo) and a not so often perfo