Blown Away

Utter silence in the full recital hall. no paper-rustling. No whispering. Certainly no coughing or throat-clearing. Not a sound and not a hair that wasn't coal black, save on the elderly. The lights dim. A singe spot shines on a single chair on the dais. A darling 15-year-old boy in evening dress appears carrying a 'cello. Polite ovation. (No cat-calls, no shrieks, just applause.) What followed was an entirely unanticipated transport of delight, for about ten feet in front of me, Gen Yokosaka sat down to perform at Tokyo's Opera City Recital Hall. He is really 23, and already probably the finest 'cellist of his generation.

Takashi himself is a 'cellist and he suggested the recital. BOY am I glad I accepted. Yokosaka played everything from Bach to contemporary (B to C, as the series demands), beginning with a strange, unaccompanied Polish solo (Lutoslavski), followed by Bach's spirited Suite No. 4, , accompanied on the piano by another teenager, as was the final number of the first half, a narcotic Schubert sonata, so sweet you could smell it.

The second half began with a contemporary Japanese composer's evocation of the famous Osaka puppet show, with lots of pizzicato and chording and rapping and banging and twanging until I feared it might actually harm the instrument, although the piece itself was fabulous interesting and interesting. The piece de resistance was the Prokofiev Sonata, which is a real keeper: lyrical in Prokofiev's unique, late romantic way, with plenty of pyro-technics that never, however, stretch beyond the limits of acceptably accessible Soviet art. P. was one who could do that without actually compromising himself, it seems. Another, lesser known Russian romantic, Anton Stepanovoch Arensky, supplied the short encore, an Elegy that I had guessed was French and Takashi guessed Faure. Then he saw the sign revealing it as Arensky, of whom neithier of us had ever heard (died just as the Russians were recovering from their humiliating defeat at the hands of the new Japanese Navy and Cavalry - maybe the Elegy was in memory of the Baltic Fleet!)

Could it be that this is a nod to the current Japanese trend to brush up their international image (or "set the record straight," as Seito-san would say)? It does seem to be in the air; the Japanese want to be proud of themselves again, without being at all Jingoistic. Could the obscure Arensky Elegy have been chosen for reasons beyond its luscious sonorities: an ever-so-subtle allusion to 1905, when the Japanese displayed exemplary, chivalrous humanity in their treatment of vanquished Russians, for whom the Elegy was written?