Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra puts on a good face at Strathmore

It’s an article of faith that music has a universal power to touch the heart. “Music,” in this context, usually means Western classical instrumental music, the kind of music played at formal occasions in times of mourning.

This is the kind of music that the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of Japan’s state broadcasting network and one of the country’s finest ensembles, is playing on its North American tour this month; the kind of music that impelled the group not to cancel its plans after the devastating earthquake and tsunami last weekend (though two musicians whose homes were destroyed stayed behind); and the kind of music that is keeping them going.

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Before the tour’s first concert, which WPAS presented at Strathmore on Wednesday night, Naoki Nojima, the chairman of the orchestra, said to the audience, “We are playing not only for you, but for ourselves, and for our loved ones back at home.”

But at such times, the universality of this kind of music becomes a paradox. An orchestra, however cosmopolitan, has an aspect of civic pride; particularly on tour, it is positioned to act as a galvanizing, representative force. At Strathmore, many Japanese residents of the D.C. region turned out to hear an orchestra that appears to be entirely made up of Japanese musicians; there was palpable emotion, concern, thought about the current dire situation in Japan. And yet an orchestra is eminently international, and thus above local concerns. This tour is led by the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, Andre Previn, with Daniel Mueller-Schott, the German cellist, as soloist; and the program focused mainly on non-Japanese composers. In short, it was a standard international-level orchestral program.

I’m by no means saying that a Japanese orchestra should play only Japanese music. But on Wednesday, the result of this dichotomy was an odd sense of a commemorative occasion fused with business as usual. The musicians were ready to play their hearts out; the audience was ready to weep; yet somehow the program was an imperfect outlet for the emotion it should eminently have been able to convey.

Though the real fault lay, I fear, in the conducting of the very frail Previn, 81. That he walks with a cane and requires assistance to get on and off the podium is no indictment (James Levine, after all, is often in the same situation these days). The problem is what he does when he’s on the podium: almost nothing. He seems to skirt the problem of interpretation altogether by simply beating time and not taking any kind of stand on the content of what he is leading — which could be charitably taken as an attempt to let the music speak for itself but unfortunately, in practice, simply muffles it. The orchestra opened with an unscheduled work to honor the people of Japan, Bach’s “Air on the G String,” a piece that’s become a veritable classical music convention in times of trouble. Unfortunately, it was played so mechanically that it became no more than a signifier of mourning.