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The Saito Kinen Orchestra was initially founded in 1984 on the ten-year anniversary of the passing of its namesake, one of the founders of Toho Gakuen School of Music and an educator of towering stature, when his former pupils gathered from around the world to hold a memorial concert. The success of the orchestra led in September 1992 to the founding of Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto in Nagano's Matsumoto City, guided every year by Festival Director Seiji Ozawa, based around the two fundamentals of orchestral music and opera. It is now 19 years later, and we find ourselves upon the festival's 20th anniversary. We are truly indebted to our faithful audience that we have made it this far, and we believe our 20th festival to be an opportunity to bring Ozawa and Hideo Saito's dream of "transmitting Western music from Japan back to its homeland in Europe" to ever more ambitious heights. Desiring to bring the experience of this magnificent music festival from Japan, from Nagano's Matsumoto City, to the world's music lovers, we have decided to transport it wholesale to other locations around the globe this summer after it ends in Matsumoto. The first year it will be travelling to Beijing and Shanghai. Beginning the following year and continuing into the future, performances are planned across cities in Europe and the United States.
In March of this year, there was a massive earthquake in the Tohoku and Kanto regions, confronting Japan with a myriad of problems. With so many people continuing to suffer unimaginable hardships, and an unwieldy number of difficulties that have no clear solution, we still believe in the power of music, and hence decided to hold the 20th Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto. We deeply hope that we are able to bring the beauty of music to even one more person. |
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