Valery Gergiev to perform at the Pacific Music Festival in Japan

From 27 July to 1 August Valery Gergiev will host a series of concerts with the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra. Four Japanese cities will see performances of Franz Schubert's Ninth Symphony, the overture from Richard Wagner's opera Tannhäuser and Max Bruch's First Violin Concerto, the solo being performed by Rainer Küchl (27 July), who for many years held the post of concert master of the Wiener Philharmoniker, and young Swedish virtuoso violinist Daniel Lozakovich (29 July – 1 August).

On 27 July the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra will appear under maestro Gergiev at the Shimin Kaikan Concert Hall in Tomakomai. The orchestra's subsequent performances will take place in Sapporo: on 29 July at the Sapporo Concert Hall Kitara there will be a gala evening, and on 30 July at the Sapporo Art Park's outdoor stage the musicians will present the festival's traditional open-to-all Picnic concert. Both programmes in Sapporo comprise sections: the matinée, as well as musicians of the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra, will feature the Otani University Chorus (Sapporo) and vocalist Aki Amo (soprano). The programme includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's motet Exsultate, jubilate and the Pacific Music Festival's anthem Jupiter set to music from a highlight from Gustav Holst's symphonic suite The Planets. The evening section will again see performances of works by Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner and Max Bruch.

On 31 July the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra will appear under Valery Gergiev at the Muza Kawasaki Symphony Hall. The culmination of the music forum comes with a final concert at one of Japan's largest venues - the Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo (1 August).

The Pacific Ocean Music Festival, of which Valery Gergiev has been Artistic Director since 2015, was founded by Leonard Bernstein in 1990. The festival's orchestra is a youth ensemble of ninety musicians aged between 18 and 29, who are selected following auditions across the globe. Over four weeks the young musicians hone their skills under the guidance of conductors and musicians from renowned symphony orchestras in order later to present well-rehearsed programmes at Japan's leading concert venues. To date the project has involved over three thousand three hundred young musicians from seventy-six countries throughout the world.