Summer 2023
From Samurai to Symphony
By Andrew Gilbert
Read this article in flipbook view
Heroism and humility are two sides of a powerful moral code in Japanese culture. They guided Japan’s ancient samurai warriors, and centuries later guided Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who bravely saved the lives of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Festival Napa Valley will present the Northern California premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, Vessels of Light, a large-scale symphonic work dedicated to Sugihara’s extraordinary courage, on July 18, with the renowned cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper as soloist.
Born in 1900, Sugihara was a descendent of the samurai and an avatar of bushido, a moral code that emphasizes righteousness. While stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, during the summer of 1940, he flouted the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s regulations and issued as many transit visas as he could to Jews desperate to escape the country. By some estimates, as many as 40,000 people are alive today because of those contraband visas.
One of those individuals is Leonard Rosen, Kristina Reiko Cooper’s husband. His father, Irving Rosen, escaped Lithuania on one of Sugihara’s visas and ended up in New York City by way of Japan and Shanghai. To the New York City-born Cooper, who converted to Orthodox Judaism and now lives in Tel Aviv with her family, Sugihara is “responsible for the existence of my husband and children.”
The granddaughter of Japanese composer Tomojiro Ikenouchi and the great-granddaughter of haiku poet Kyoshi Takahama, himself the son of a samurai, Cooper feels a deep connection to Sugihara’s heroism. As someone who’s half-Japanese, Cooper fully appreciates the radical nature of his efforts. “I come from a samurai background too, and if you distill the bushido code, when you take away the noise and the chaos, you listen to what’s inside of you and do the right thing,” she says.
“Instead of obeying authority, Sugihara was so Japanese in the opposite way. For Sugihara to go against someone above him, to go against the grain, it’s just not done.”
Shunned by the Foreign Ministry after the war, Sugihara spent the rest of his life in obscurity in Japan and the Soviet Union. But Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, recognized him with the title of Righteous Gentile Among the Nations in 1984, the only Japanese national to be so honored. He was too frail to travel to Israel for the ceremony, but shortly before his death he was asked about his decision to help so many desperate Jewish refugees. He refused the mantle of hero. “It is the kind of sentiment anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes,” he said.
Determined to revive Sugihara’s memory, Cooper approached Yad Vashem about commissioning a major work in his honor. Cooper wanted a composer who was respected across the classical music world but also capable of writing a work broadly accessible to general audiences. Lera Auerbach fit the bill perfectly.
The women knew each other as students at Juilliard in the 1990s, when Auerbach was known more as a piano prodigy than a composer. Over time, a steady stream of prestigious commissions brought Auerbach’s composing talent to the attention of Cooper, whose track record includes introducing major works by the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Philip Glass, Tigran Mansurian, Mario Davidovsky, and Patrick Zimmerli.
The title Vessels of Light references both the Japanese art form of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is mended with precious metal-infused lacquer, and the Jewish mystical tradition in which sacred vessels of light must be reassembled to restore God’s perfect order. For the libretto, Auerbach drew on great Yiddish poets from the 1930s. Vessels of Light was premiered in Kaunas last November, and received its US premiere at Carnegie Hall this past April.
For Cooper, it’s the work of a lifetime. “I would call this a theater orchestral piece,” she says. “I’ve always been of the mind that a musician is somewhat of an actor. When I walk on stage, I’m not me anymore. I’m conveying the voices of the past, the voices that could have been.”
Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, Vessels of Light, will be performed Tuesday, July 18 at Charles Krug with Festival Orchestra Napa under the baton of Constantine Orbelian, Volti Chorale, soprano Ronit Widmann-Levy, and cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper.