Conductor Kazuki Yamada on joining the CBSO: ‘I thought I was too old for this job’

Talent scouts from music agencies could do worse than set up shop in Birmingham. While the world’s leading orchestras vie with each other to pin down one of the fast-dwindling number of top-ranking conductors from the older generation, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has shown an uncanny ability to strike gold.

Its winning streak started back in 1980, when it settled on a tousle-headed 25-year-old hopeful from Liverpool called Simon Rattle. He spent 18 years with the CBSO and the rest — Berlin Phil, London Symphony Orchestra — is history. That might have looked like a flash in the pan, except for what followed. Rattle’s successors, all appointed at the very start of their careers, have turned out to be an all-star line-up: Sakari Oramo, Andris Nelsons and then the CBSO’s first female music director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Sadly, her six-year tenure, with two years lost to the pandemic, seemed over almost before it began. When she announced her departure, everybody wondered where the CBSO would turn. Could its magic touch work for the fifth time in a row?

On April 27, the CBSO’s new chief conductor and artistic adviser steps up to the podium. Kazuki Yamada, born in 1979 in Kanagawa, Japan, and already the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, has been appointed to an initial contract of four and a half years. He says he was amazed. “I didn’t expect this job because I am 44 and in the past the CBSO chose conductors barely out of their twenties. I thought I was already too old, so I was extremely happy to be asked,” he says.

The relationship with Yamada goes back to 2012 and has built up slowly. He says that the short rehearsal periods common in the UK mean that conductors usually have little opportunity to get to know an orchestra well, but a two-week tour of Japan in 2016 gave him time to speak to every musician and feel that a bond was being forged. During that tour “we sort of fell in love”.

That decade-long getting-to-know-you experience is mirrored in Yamada’s slow rise. Unlike his immediate CBSO predecessors, he has not been a shooting star in the conductors’ firmament. After graduating from the conducting class at Tokyo University of the Arts, he found there were few opportunities. In 2007, he entered the Besançon International Competition for Young Conductors, where he reached the second round, but says he had difficulty communicating with the orchestra as he did not speak English at all at that time. He decided he had to come to Europe, settled in Berlin in 2009, married and won the Besançon competition at the second attempt. Then the doors opened.

Since then, Yamada has straddled east and west. He holds positions with the Japan Philharmonic, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, the Yokohama Sinfonietta and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo alongside his responsibilities in Birmingham, which gives him a bird’s-eye view of the differences in music-making that still exist between Japan and Europe.

“Japanese orchestras are now high quality, very exact, sometimes almost too precise,” he says. “In a Japanese orchestra, everybody is concentrating on being correct to the letter of the music. A European orchestra has more flexibility and I can feel the colours, the temperature, the perfumes of European orchestras, the time and space they are able to create.”

Following his own experience as a student, Yamada is full of praise for the provision of music in the Japanese educational system, where most children learn to read scores. Elementary schools offer recorder lessons, and there is a good supply of violin and piano teachers for older students, but he says priorities have been changing.

“After the second world war there was little but western music in schools. Then, around 10 or 15 years ago, the Japanese education system decided it should put more emphasis on educating the young about our own country’s music. That proved difficult at first and there is still less teaching of Japanese music in schools than western classical music, but the balance is changing and now we are getting to appreciate our own music more.”

It seems there may be a generational change under way in Japan that is not dissimilar from what is happening in the west. Although Japanese audiences are as exceptionally silent and attentive as they have always been, he says, there is more competition to fill the seats. “The audience for classical music in Japan is limited, not huge,” says Yamada. “Tokyo has nine symphony orchestras and sometimes several orchestras have their concerts on the same night, which means every orchestra is struggling to get an audience.”

China is a hope for future audiences, but he has reservations. “Japan was in a similar place a couple of generations ago, then Korea after that, and now China with its huge population, which can become a big market for music, but don’t forget this is where Europe was 100 years ago and orchestras there are struggling now. Japan has probably peaked. Perhaps China is heading to a peak in its turn.”

He doesn’t sound despondent, though, and is upbeat about his first full season as chief conductor in Birmingham, which has just been announced. It is 50 years since the CBSO Chorus was founded, 40 of them with chorus director Simon Halsey at the helm, and the season will open with Verdi’s Requiem as a showcase. Other highlights include cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason playing Shostakovich, the first UK performance of Anna Clyne’s Piano Concerto, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and — English-music lovers will be pleased to note — Yamada conducting Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

He is not such a stranger to Elgar as people might imagine. “When I was very young I bought a piano book and one of the pieces in it was an arrangement of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 1,” he says. “I loved it immediately and when all the musicians in my high-school brass band were invited to try conducting, I chose that. The players voted for me and I became student conductor, so this music means a lot to me.” Could Yamada be the first Japanese conductor at the Last Night of the Proms? It would be rash to bet against it.

cbso.co.uk