A man who you love to hate. -- Uno Koho, 宇野功芳 (1930 - 2016)

Koho Uno, a music journalist, an orchestra conductor, a chorus conductor, died at age 86. Although I think he was not so much well-known outside of Japan, it suddenly occurred to my mind that I wanted write something about his career when I heard the news of his death.

Wikipedia (Japanese)
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AE%87%E9%87%8E%E5%8A%9F%E8%8A%B3

First of all, I must confess that, in my younger days, his writing style and choice of words me much influence toward me when writing essays or stories myself. It was when I was in high school that I found one of his books by chance in the shelf of a large bookstore in Sendai that I started reading his essays on classical music and orchestra conductors. There was this passage about a symphonic piece conducted by W. Furtwangler in his peculiar way like this. “It is an accelerando with a flesh that will bleed if you cut it”. He also wrote about Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished” by Carlos Kleiber and Vienna Philharmonic, in a way like this: “In the second theme of the second movement, his conducting is just like a calligraphy master, nonchalantly moving his brush to spell out the words”.

So naïve a teenage boy or a young man of early 20’s as I was, I used to go to CD stores after having read and memorized his essays on conductors and orchestras. It was the 1980s in the midst of the Bubble Economy, with so much extravagancy, vanity, and a lot of money flowing in the society. He started to work as a conductor and released a couple of CDs around this time. How excited I was when I finally found he conducted an orchestra to perform Beethoven's symphonies. Because of this much expectation on what or how he would create a work of art, his actual performances disappointed me so much. He openly disliked and criticized Herbert von Karajan or Georg Solti’s interpretation and rendition for being superfluous or lacking “deep” spirituality, but his music through the orchestra sounded much poorer, thinner, and shallower than that. But he continued his stage performance as a conductor, to sound famous symphonies of Beethoven, Bruckner, or Mozart. His tempo was ridiculously awkward, and timpani sounded so huge and cheap, as if it were firecrackers at a local festival in Taiwan or China. We started to experience the Internet activity. His peculiar writing style was often ridiculed in online forums. His typical expressions were copied and pasted out in the numerous forums. This phenomenon made me think of Mr. Uno being a respectable man in that he did what he believed was good for him to do, no matter how malicious and abusive people in public were when they criticized, despised, or ridiculed what he did. To his performance of Beethoven’s symphony, some still say, “Terrible… This is a sacrilege to Beethoven. Make apologies to him right now!” However, it should be noted that not a little influence did he make to classical music fans. Takashi Asahina was said he made it to become a maestro in Japan, thanks to Mr. Uno’s positive reviews or praises on him. Not only did he spend many words of praise and admiration toward Bruno Walter, he introduced Evgeny Mravinsky, Carl Shuricht, or Han Knapertsbush who were not so well-known in Japan at that time. Mr. Uno was the type of journalist who evaluated highly even about non-popular musicians if their performance was outstandingly excellent.

His records can be found on YouTube. It's amazing. He kept up with this own style even after he had reached 80 years old. He was a character.
After hearing his performances on YouTube, I began to realize Mr. Uno was a very serious man, who pursued having fun through music with all his strength, while remembering his favorite conductors and all, to play music like no other.

This is the music I was hearing while jogging today

I was listening to this record a few times over and over today...

I was not quite sure why I wanted to write about him, but as I keep typing out sentences, I began thinking this way. Maybe it is because I admire his effort about his work and life, and, even though I am not a musician or a critic, there’s a lot to learn from him.

Internet is a funny thing. It allows us to do communications across borders and cultures, but it also shrinks our mind and spirit for fear of receiving backbiting or abuses from others who we cannot even see. Reading Japanese news articles, even a trivial comment on Twitter or Facebook from musicians, actors/actresses, scholars or any other famous people can cause to get him or her “burst into flames” on the Internet, which makes me think of something I had never imagined when I was just a naïve teenager more than 25 years ago.