Saturday 10 November 2018

The JPO’s Splendid Evening with Yasuo Shinozaki

This review was originally posted on the Artslink website.

The trouble with our local symphonic music scene is not that we lack talented musicians or enthusiastic listeners, but that the resources of time and money are so tight that a performance under any particular conductor can only be as good as the conductor is skilled in getting a lot of heavy work done in short bursts of rehearsal time. It was a great pleasure at the JPO’s concert this past Thursday to find that the Japanese conductor Yasuo Shinozaki has exactly the right kinds of skills to get the job done.

From the first moments of the overture by Mendelssohn, Shinozaki established a strong presence and authority. He gave a very clear, very precise beat, and the orchestra played with a wonderfully unified rhythmic precision. There were moments throughout the evening when the string section sounded like one single mammoth instrument, not only nearly perfectly synchronised in their attack and rhythms but also unified in their articulation, phrasing, and tone.