Taichi Fukumura caps his first season as the Illinois Symphony's music director this weekend, in a year he says has exceeded expectations. As the maestro gets settled into his position, he’ll soon regularly be on the podium of one of the world’s greatest orchestras, too.
A celebratory season finale Saturday at Illinois State University’s Center for Performing Arts features rich and grandiose selections: Brian Raphael Nabors' Pulse, Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major and, for the dessert, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5.
“I wouldn’t call it a dessert course—it’s very much a main course,” Fukumura said of the Shostakovich in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
Indeed, it is savory. This writer stands corrected.
“Not everybody really knows what Shostakovich is about,” said Fukumura, “which is defiance. Which is staying true to himself. And finding a way to maintain his artistic voice while surviving living in the Soviet Union.”
Born in St. Petersburg in 1906, Shostakovich remained when his home country fell under Soviet rule in 1922.
“Historically, it’s been a challenge for this orchestra to spread the word about what Shostakovich means to us, which is a window to a certain time and a certain place,” Fukumura said.
In a 2006 interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, celebrated conductor Marin Alsop said Shostakovich and his music cannot be separated from the political climate in which it was created.
“Of course, that did influence everything he wrote,” she said, “yet at the same time, it’s so paradoxical and ambiguous as to what his particular viewpoints were.”
That’s because, Alsop said, under Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime, he couldn’t make any viewpoint known. Unlike Russian contemporaries like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, who created much of their catalogs abroad, Shostakovich and other artists working in the USSR were subject to censorship and strict parameters in what they could and couldn’t create. It was an environment that resulted in both bizarre Soviet propaganda and, quite often, rich works layered with subversive transgression—at a time when the price of artistic deviance could be death.
“People were disappearing,” Fukumura said. “What the censorship was getting on artists about was approaching any kind of bourgeois, avantgarde—something that’s not for the common people but something that reminds them too much of the West.”
Just before Shostakovich wrote his fifth symphony, he received a letter from the state placing him on notice.
“I’m told he always had a packed bag, throughout his life,” Fukumura said. “Because he never took it for granted that he would get to live the full next day.”
“Symphony No. 5 is one where he gave [the state] an answer, and said here is a standard symphony—not something that is overly complicated or for the elite few, but something everybody can understand. It has an almost Beethovenian journey, but at the same time he’s always trying to find ways to have hidden messages.”
Past as prologue
It’s a stark contrast to the artistic freedoms enjoyed by composers working in Europe and the Americas, like Ravel, whose piano concerto was composed less than a decade later. This weekend, 2022 Van Cliburn Medal winner Anna Geniushene makes her ISO debut as the featured soloist.
Like Nabors’ Pulse, made in 2019, there’s a clear line to jazz, creating a sound far nearer to Gershwin than Shostakovich.
“Both of them fuse different styles and genres of music,” said Fukumura. “Both of these composers bring out such amazing, brilliant colors of the orchestra. Brian Nabors’ Pulse has that rhythmic drive that you hear in a lot of recent music, but also it has an ending that’s all about unity. It brings us to something very human.”
But Shostakovich’s life and work are perhaps not totally unfamiliar to American artists of the 1980s culture wars, for example, or even now, as the Trump administration seeks to take control of the zeitgeist.
“It’s a reminder that we have to keep making music. We have to keep making art. We have to keep culture alive, and we have to keep connected with each other,” Fukumura said.
Joining the 'Big Five'
In addition to his role at the Illinois Symphony, Fukumura announced this week a new post as assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, regarded as one of the "Big Five" American symphony orchestras with New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Fukumura was on the short list for several regional orchestras and he wasn’t looking for another assistantship, having departed Fort Worth Symphony to seek a pair of music directorships or a stack of guest engagements.
He received an invitation to apply for the job—an offer no conductor could refuse. In order to make it all work, James Feddeck has also joined Cleveland Orchestra's artistic team, as principal conductor and youth orchestra advisor.
“I’m very excited about having both positions,” Fukumura said. “I will be simultaneously assisting the best musicians in the world, while also working with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra to create something exciting in our community here.”
Illinois Symphony Orchestra's Passion and Pulse is 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts, 400 W. Beaufort St. Tickets are $30-$65 at 309-438-2535 and ilsymphony.org.
