Yutaka Sado

Yutaka Sado and Tonkünstler-Orchester – Mahler: Symphonie No. 7 (Live) (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:45 minutes | 1,43 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tonkunstler Orchestra

No other symphony by Gustav Mahler has been subject to such a wide palette of readings and interpretations as the Seventh Symphony, from a scholarly and theoretical standpoint as well as by musicians, conductors and orchestras. It has been described as a «manifestation of elated sensual pleasure, a great Gloria» (in the foreword to the Philharmonia pocket score) and as having a «wholeness and formal coherence» with «mostly folkloric, thus memorable, themes» (critic Ernst Rychnovsky after the premiere in Prague in 1908). It has been accused of «disjointedness» (musicologist Attila Csampai), and of being a «very problematic work» (Mahler pioneer and conductor Otto Klemperer). Some have complained that its first and last movements don’t fit together; others, that it’s the middle movements that are incompatible. Some have heard, and still hear, the sound of nature, forest, birdsong in this symphony, while others hear no nature at all but only depictions of the soul or society. It has been described as Mahler’s Romantic symphony; the one-time Mahler assistant and famous conductor Bruno Walter specifically said that «in the three middle movements, full of significance and human insight, there is a reemergence of the Romantic whom we believed to have been overcome». For a conductor of the following generation, Michael Gielen, also a Mahler expert, the Seventh Symphony is, by contrast, «about projections out into the world», about «larger contexts than the individual alone». The musicologist Constantin Floros, who has published standard works on Mahler, goes so far as to trace a connection between the Seventh Symphony and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a link to the «eternal notion of return, this highest formula of affirmation», as expressed in the chapter «The seven seals» of «Thus spoke Zarathustra». It makes sense: Mahler, who went through a phase of enthusiastically and intensively reading the philosopher’s works, said that Nietzsche’s «Zarathustra» was «born entirely out of the spirit of music, indeed, develops in a positively symphonic fashion». Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that, in the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, Mahler «approaches the idiom of Richard Strauss’s tone poem ‹Also sprach Zarathustra› closer than anywhere else» (Floros).

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Yutaka Sado, Tonkünstler-Orchester – Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D major including «Blumine» (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:19 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tonkunstler Orchestra

The gateway to Gustav Mahler’s cosmos, with the ecstatic conclusion to his First Symphony, may sound wonderfully light and musically beguiling, but the composer’s initial efforts with his inaugural attempt at the genre were difficult, and he went through multiple versions before finding its definitive form. It was during this process that he scrapped a movement with the title «Blumine», which Yutaka Sado now revives for discussion as part of his comprehensive Mahler explorations. It follows Sergei Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, which promises powerful emotions. The young Japanese pianist Kyohei Sorita, who has long been a familiar face with the Tonkunstler Orchestra, won a silver medal at the 2021 Chopin Competition.

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Tonkünstler Orchester & Yutaka Sado – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 & Suite for Variety Orchestra (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:12:11 minutes | 2,57 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tonkunstler Orchestra

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Russian composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century.

The Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, by Dmitri Shostakovich is a work for orchestra composed between April and July 1937. Its first performance was on November 21, 1937, in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky. The premiere was a huge success and received an ovation that lasted well over half an hour.

The Suite for Variety Orchestra (post-1956) is a suite in eight movements by Dmitri Shostakovich. The work consists of a collection of movements which derive from other works by the composer. It is also named Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra, for example in Derek Hulme’s Shostakovich catalogue.

For many years the Suite for Variety Orchestra was misidentified as the “lost” Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2 (1938), a different work in three movements that was lost during World War II, the piano score of which was rediscovered in 1999 by Manashir Yakubov, and orchestrated the following year by Gerard McBurney.

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Tonkünstler-Orchester, Yutaka Sado – Messiaen : Turangalîla-symphonie, I/29 (Live) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:15:56 minutes | 760 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tonkunstler Orchestra

The work of the French composer Olivier Messiaen in General and his Turangalila Symphony in particular have now long been considered milestones in musical history. The symphony’s premiere in 1949 was conducted by a 31-year-old Leonard Bernstein. He was standing in for Serge Koussevitzky, who had commissioned the work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This recording by the Tonkunstler Orchestra and Yutaka Sado, who was once Leonard Bernstein’s assistant in Vienna, joins many other productions on the in-house label the orchestra founded in 2016. The CD was recorded live during the 17-18 concert season in the Vienna Musikverein with two Messiaen experts from France as soloists: Valerie Hartmann-Claverie at the ondes martenot and Roger Muraro at the piano. The trilingual booklet offers music-lovers the opportunity to deepen their listening experience in German, English or Japanese.

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Tonkünstler-Orchester & Yutaka Sado – Brahms: Symphony No. 2, Op. 73 & Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:13 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tonkunstler Orchestra

Yutaka Sado (佐渡 裕, Sado Yutaka, born 13 May 1961 in Kyoto) is a Japanese conductor.

While still in school, Sado obtained a position in the Kansai Nikikai, a Japanese school of opera, where he had the opportunity to work with the New Japan Philharmonic and the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra, learning operatic repertoire. In 1987, he traveled to the United States to attend the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he studied with Seiji Ozawa. Later he won the Davidoff Special Prize for a competition in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. He returned to Japan as an assistant to Ozawa and made his debut with the New Japan Philharmonic in Tokyo with a Haydn symphony series. He later studied with Charles Dutoit, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and Leonard Bernstein, with whom he toured the Soviet Union and Germany.

Sado won first prize and became the third Japanese winner (after Seiji Ozawa in 1979 and Yoko Matsuo in 1982) at the 39th annual International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors in Besançon, France in 1989. In 1990, he became a regular participant in the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, along with Christoph Eschenbach and Michael Tilson Thomas. Sado also serves as artistic director and artistic advisor of the Hyogo Performing Arts Center and principal conductor of the Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra which he helped establish in 2005. Sado also is chief conductor of the Siena Wind Orchestra [ja] in Japan.

Outside Japan, Sado was principal conductor of the Orchestre Lamoureux from 1993 to 2011. He recorded with the Orchestre Lamoureux for such labels as Erato. In October 1995, Sado was named the winner of the first Leonard Bernstein Jerusalem International Music Competition. In 2011, he conducted Beethoven’s 9th symphony, with 10,000 Japanese people, for the victims of the 2011 Japanese earthquake. In November 2013, the Tonkünstler Orchestra announced the appointment of Sado as its next principal conductor, effective with the 2015–2016 season, with an initial contract of 3 years.

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Tonkünstler-Orchester & Yutaka Sado – Mahler: Symphony No. 3 in D Minor (Live) ()
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:39:42 minutes | 1,64 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tonkunstler Orchestra

An entire epic in musical form, from a jagged march at the start to a slow hymn to love as the finale. Between them, two lightweight scherzi and two choral movements with words from Nietzsche’s «Also sprach Zarathustra» and the folk song collection «Des Knaben Wunderhorn»: Gustav Mahler’s «Third» is among the most spectacular and expansive symphonies of them all, and it gives voice to heaven and earth. A work of this scope takes up a whole concert, and the Tonkunstler Orchestra and its Music Director Yutaka Sado devoted an evening to it in November 2021 in the Wiener Musikverein – with the exquisite voices of Kate Lindsey, the Vienna Boys Choir and the Wiener Singverein. As a Viennese orchestra with a musical tradition dating back over a century, the Tonkunstler Orchestra plays, like the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, on Viennese instruments. Gustav Mahler’s life story was also closely associated with Vienna. He conducted the city’s first performance of his own Third Symphony – albeit a good two years after the world premiere in Krefeld in 1902.

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