Credits:

Hubert Soudant

Description:

The sound of maturity!　The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra's performance in recent years has been even more remarkable than before. One of the indications of this is that the orchestra won the Concert Performance Award (Japanese Artist) at the 21st Music Pen Club Music Awards (2008), and some music magazines even ranked the orchestra among the top Japanese orchestras. The driving force behind the success of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra is Hubert Sudern, who succeeded Kazuyoshi Akiyama, who devoted 40 years of his life to nurturing the orchestra, as Music Director.　Hubert Soudern was born in Maastricht, the Netherlands in 1946, and won the first prize at the Besançon International Conducting Competition (1971), the first prize at the Guido Cantelli International Competition (1975), and the second prize at the Karajan International Conducting Competition (1971). After 13 years as Music Director of the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, he was appointed Music Director of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in 2004.Suddahn has taken Haydn as his starting point, and has placed classics such as Mozart and Beethoven at the center of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra's program, as well as the Schubert Cycle last year (2008) and the Schumann-Brahms Cycle this year (2009), to further deepen the orchestra's capabilities. The Bruckner Symphony No. 7 is the most famous symphonic work by Bruckner.　Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 was recorded over two days in a session at their home base, the MUZA Kawasaki Symphony Hall, and was performed very naturally as an extension of this classical-based line, with a conductor and orchestra that know the hall's acoustics inside and out, filling the hall with a deep, matured sound. The conductor and orchestra, who know the hall's acoustics well, filled the entire hall space with a mature sound with a deep flavor. After this recording, Sudern, who has conducted many of the world's top orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony, Dresden Staatskapelle, Bamberg Symphony, and Milan's Scala Philharmonic, said with conviction, "The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra is now a first-class orchestra in the world. This is a world-class recording that confirms this statement.　［Comment courtesy of Universal Music/IMS