Valery Gergiev performs in Tokyo

The concert took place at the concert hall of the Bunkamura cultural centre in Tokyo. Valery Gergiev conducted the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte and Franz Schubert’s Eighth “Unfinished” Symphony. According to  Valery Gergiev, the programme was specially devised to underline the courage of the Japanese people on having survived such a dreadful natural disaster.

The concert was attended by roughly three hundred people, mainly students and residents evacuated from regions affected by the disaster – the Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate Prefectures. According to ITAR-TASS, after the event one resident of the Fukushima Prefecture said “Almost a year has passed since the tragedy and we have to move on with our lives. Today, this beautiful music has revived our energies”.

Funds raised from the concert will be transferred to a foundation established to support victims of the catastrophe which struck in March 2011.

The Mariinsky Theatre and Japan share a particularly close relationship – over the last nineteen years the company has toured to the Land of the Rising Sun several dozen times. Last year Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre responded to the tragedy immediately; several concerts were performed in memory of those who lost their lives as a result of the disaster, and at the Moscow Easter Festival there was a rendition of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. As Valery Gergiev stressed at the time: “the catastrophe in Japan should serve as a reminder to mankind, a reason to consider the future of the planet, the need to limit the use of natural resources and a summons to responsibility”.