Symphonies & Scorpions: “Ooh!”
WELCOME TO THE 26th DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY.
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Tokyo : Saturday, May 10
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4:30-5pm REHEARSAL Suntory Hall 6:00pm CONCERT Suntory Hall PROGRAM: Mozart: Symphony No.38 in D, K.504 (Prague) Mahler: Symphony No. 5 CHARLES DUTOIT, conductor
“Ooh!”
The last day of the tour! It really crept up on us and I still have unfinished gift shopping to do.
On the long-distance trek from my room in the Okura South Wing to breakfast in the Main Wing, my route funnels me by all the strategically placed ritzy boutiques in the Lower Level shopping arcade. A rack of colorful scarves catches my eye. Light bulb! Cecily loves scarves. They’re lightweight and easy to pack. I enter the shop, empty but for two saleswomen.
I point to a particular scarf and ask whether it’s silk. The saleswoman says, “Ooh!”
Is that a good sign? Does she mean that she, too, finds it attractive, or is she taken aback by the cost? So I point to another, which I don’t like as much.
“Is this silk?”
She responds with a nod. “Silk,” she says. Since there are only seven or eight scarves she proceeds to point to each one. For most, she says, “silk,” but a few of them, she says, “Ooh!”
I need to get to the bottom of this. At least she hadn’t asked if she could taste me. But what was so special about the few that were “Ooh!”? I wasn’t about to give up, so I point again to one of those and ask, “Silk?”
She looks at me like I’m an idiot and shakes her head.
“Ooh!” she responds with finality. Head-scratching time. Then it dawns on me.
“Oh, wool!” I said, to which she happily nods in the affirmative. “Ooh!”
Well, wouldn’t you know, after all that hard work none of the scarves appeal to me very much and I end up not buying anything, but we’ve established an unbreakable bond. We exchange repeated bows, like smiling Drinking Birds. As I leave the store, I hear the saleswoman practicing on her colleague, “Woooo… Woooo…”
Scarfing Soba
Ronan and Chan and I meet at noon in the lobby. They had heard there were traditional teashops around Ueno Park. That’s news to me, but I’m happy to go with them to find out, because that area is one of my old stomping grounds. In the Nezu neighborhood adjacent to the park, there’s a little ryokan called Sawanoya where I often stayed on past tours, eschewing the luxury palaces that were the official BSO hotels, preferring the personal touch of a simple, traditional, elegant Japanese inn. I fondly remember the owner, Sawa-san, busy at the front desk with his pet parrot perched on his shoulder. I once read a travel guide boasting that the Nezu neighborhood was “redolent of old Edo.” I never did meet old Edo to find out how true that was, but I suppose the book might have been referring to the ancient name of Tokyo.
It’s a beautiful day and the three of us have a lovely walk through huge Ueno Park, passing by shrines, the lake, food stands, and a street performer doing acrobatics on a soapbox. Amateur stuff, but a politely enthusiastic crowd ranging from teenagers to elder adults gathers around to watch, and applauds in delight when he juggles swords while balanced on a makeshift seesaw. There’s something very appealing to that old-fashioned innocence that maybe Americans have lost, at least in part. Hollywood and hi-tech might have their appeal but the ability to enjoy simplicity seems to be a vanishing art.
When I lived here in 1986, my family engaged in a long-standing Tokyo spring tradition—picnicking while watching the cherry trees blossom in Ueno Park. We shared the experience with about 100,000 Tokyo enthusiasts and our good friends, Bonnie and Bill Sexton. At that time, Bill was Asia bureau chief for Newsday on Long Island, whom I had first met when he was their correspondent on the BSO’s 1979 China tour. He had learned I was from Long Island, wrote a column on my visit to the Shanghai Conservatory, and fell in love with the Boston Symphony. Ever since, Bonnie and Bill, who became devoted Tanglewood volunteers for decades, have been our close friends.
It had been a long time since I was last in this neck of the woods, but once I spot Nezu Station I’m able to navigate more or less by feel through a maze of colorful alleys lined with flowerpots, two and three-story traditional homes with tiny but alluringly sculpted gardens, shops adorned with colorful norin banners, and neighborhood restaurants with exotic lunchtime aromas wafting through their shoji screens. Nezu is becoming more redolent by the moment.
Along one such alley is a tiny but elegant shop where some pretty scarves hang in the window. We go inside for a closer look and within thirty seconds I find the perfect scarf for Cecily, which appears to be silk and not ooh. The only problem is there’s no merchant to be found. The shop, about six-by-fifteen feet, is not a conducive place for anyone to hide from Americans, so I pass through an inner door and find myself in the entryway of someone’s house.
A man, who I assume is the proprietor, quickly emerges from a back room. Though his English is as bad as my Japanese, bit by bit and nod by nod, I establish our reason for being there. He gestures for the three of us to sit down, brings us some green tea, and departs. He returns with his wife, who turns out to be the actual shop owner and speaks a few more words of English. Asked about our presence in such an out-of-the-way part of town, I explain my affinity with the neighborhood, and that Ronan and I are violinists on tour with the Boston Symphony. This news delights them, particularly because their neighbor across the alley is also a violinist. They tried to fetch him but apparently he’s out, so I’ll never hear the end of that story.
Ronan is getting a bit peckish and asks me to ask the couple if they know a place where we could have soba for lunch. I assure him that once we complete the appropriate amount of conversation, they’ll be only too happy to comply, but that if we seem we’re in a hurry they’ll think we’re rude and give us the cold shoulder.
When the time is right, I pop the question. The couple produces a map of the neighborhood and draws several stars on it indicating the dining possibilities. We choose one on a street a few blocks away (a street being no wider than a paved path, and a block being about the length of your shadow on a winter morning). The husband puts on his shoes and escorts us to our soba restaurant. As we leave their abode, the wife presents each of us with a gift of a small stone wrapped elegantly in cane, to be used as a paperweight. When we arrive at the restaurant the husband makes sure that a table would soon be available for us, but departs before we can offer to buy him lunch.
[image error]Zen soba in the throwback Nezu neighborhood of Tokyo.
If you love soba like I love soba…The restaurant is the epitome of Zen simplicity. Just a few long, low-to-the-ground wooden tables, which can accommodate a total of perhaps fifteen people. The floor is tatami so of course we remove our shoes. There is a single wall-hanging of three real, large lily pads mounted on a wide, scroll-like sheet of rice paper.
In May, a warm humid month, only cold soba is served, of which there are two kinds: hearty, 100% buckwheat; or a subtler, 20% buckwheat/80% wheat mix. Ronan and I choose the former, Chan the latter. Everything is made from scratch right there, and I’m in heaven.
The setting is quiet and intimate, and of course everyone in Japan is ultra-polite. While waiting for our food, Ronan, who is very taken by the esthetics of the place, pulls out his camera. Chan scolds him in her Vietnamese-inflected English, “Ronan, wait until your noodle come out!”
Finale
As Dutoit has a plane to catch, the downbeat for our final concert is early, at 6:00 PM, and besides not playing any repeats in the Mozart symphony, we won’t play any encores.
I’m sure that both the presenters and our management have been pleased with overall concert attendance. Though a few of our concerts have been dotted with an empty seat here and there, there is a long line in front of Suntory Hall when I arrive. That sight is certainly gratifying for the musicians, where even venerable institutions like the Boston Symphony fight a never-ending battle to fill the hall.
Backstage, the one item typically found in American concert halls but has been sorely missed on this tour is a good coffee machine. We’ve generally had to content ourselves with water, instant coffee or teabags, with Creap instant creamer, some local snacks of unrecognizable content, and the occasional vending machine dispensing beverages with such exotically dubious names as Polcari Sweat and Calpis. In comparison, many European halls have backstage cafés and bars with abundant menus. Of course, it’s not a make-or-break issue, but when musicians are captive in the building for more than an hour between a 6:00 PM acoustic rehearsal and the beginning of the concert, and there’s no time for a real meal, it would be nice to be able to fortify oneself. It’s all for the music, of course.
Most of the tour concert halls have had dressing rooms, but certainly not enough space to accommodate a touring orchestra, so wardrobe trunks lining the corridors become makeshift dressing rooms. The exception was the hall in Guangzhou, which is designed for opera, and therefore had a cavernous backstage area where everyone’s trunk and all the instrument trunks combined took up a fraction of the space.
Our final concert is perhaps our greatest success. The Mozart sparkles and the Mahler overwhelms. I’m very confident saying that the present incarnation of the Boston Symphony plays as well or better than anytime within my memory. The string players, comprising half the orchestra, are all strong players. The wind, brass, percussion, and harp players not only are absolutely first-class individual musicians, but consistently play as an ensemble at the highest level. Most orchestras have some weak players or even weak sections. The BSO today, though, is one formidable bunch of musicians.
After the Mahler, the applause continues after the musicians leave the stage, the audience determined to extend the thrill of the experience as long as possible. Because Dutoit has a plane to catch, he is literally out of the building before it subsides.
I, on the other hand, am in no hurry. So, after bidding my wardrobe trunk a fond farewell—the mighty trunks, being retired after more than sixty years of loyal service, will be shipped home immediately and put into dry dock in favor of lighter, more maneuverable ones—I walk back to the hotel, only a few blocks from the hall. There I rejoin Ronan and Chan and violinist Jennie Shames, another of my dearest BSO friends, and the four of us go for a farewell dinner. After finding nothing of interest open in the area around our hotel, we subway one stop to the Roppongi entertainment district and chance upon a wonderfully rustic restaurant with some very unusual menu items. For example, grilled wild boar pork belly with wild mushrooms cooked at the table, all the ingredients sitting on a large leaf over a miniature charcoal grill. Starting tomorrow I’ll be on my own for a few days, visiting old friends before returning to the US, but what a wonderful exclamation point to end the official tour.
***
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[image error]COMING SOON!
NEWS FLASH: MY FIRST POLITICAL THRILLER, THE BEETHOVEN SEQUENCE, IS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE ON SEPTEMBER 8! A MENTALLY UNBALANCED MUSIC TEACHER BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! PREPOSTEROUS? STAY TUNED.
