National Arts Centre Orchestra's tour to Korea and Japan serves up Beethoven, Oscar Peterson, and some cultural diplomacy

Winnipeg Free Press

06-06-2025

TOKYO – The daily operation of an orchestra typically runs like clockwork — every minute is meticulously scheduled, rehearsals are tightly run, and the search for precision is constant.
What better way to test the strength of this refined apparatus than to take it out on the road, and bring it to an audience that may be very familiar with the music, but not with the musicians?
The National Arts Centre Orchestra is at the tail end of an 11-day tour to South Korea and Japan that included stops in Busan, Gumi, Seoul, Tokyo, and Tsu, wrapping up with a performance in Osaka on Saturday.
Some 2,500 patrons showed up to their performance at the Seoul Arts Center.
Approximately 60 world-class musicians are on this trip, and at the centre of this musical gyre is conductor Alexander Shelley.
Squeezing in time in-between rehearsals to meet in the lobby of a Tokyo hotel, Shelley laughed when asked if he had time to explore the city.
Shelley described the trip as a mission of cultural diplomacy as much as one that brings the orchestra to new audiences.
' The most exciting part of it for me is not demonstrating how special — even when it's true — the country of origin is that we are representing, but in fact how much the things that we're all looking to experience and articulate are shared,' he said.
This was the orchestra's first appearance in Seoul, and its first time back in Japan in 40 years.
An international orchestra tour is a mighty expensive endeavour. The tour came with a budget of approximately $2 million, funded in part by philanthropic donations, said Annabelle Cloutier, strategy, governance and public affairs executive at the National Arts Centre. It mobilized more than 110 artists and musicians, and engaged over 16 regional partners across 47 unique community events.
It took three years to meticulously plan for this titanic trip field, accounting for the more than 50,000 cubic metres of cargo that made the trip over.
These metrics might seem like a high price tag even for the long string of concerts presented. But this tour also coincided with a few diplomatic projects. The concert in Seoul, for example, closed out the Korea-Canada Year of Cultural Exchanges ─ a joint effort to commemorate 60 years of diplomatic relations.
Likewise, the Japan leg of the tour featured quite a few engagements with the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, wherein the embassy's Oscar Peterson Theatre serves as the venue for the ongoing centennial celebration of the legendary Canadian jazz pianist.
Shelley said tours like these help to establish cultural common ground.
' I don't think I could do my job unless I believed at the most profound level that the human experience is constant across time and across culture. A Korean woman born 300 years ago would've had a very different experience of life to me growing up in London in the ''80s. But I think that the underlying motivations and experiences would've been identical: hope and fear, ambition and love, loss and melancholy.'
The contrast between hope and fear is one that Shelley particularly savours in Beethoven's Fifth symphony, which made several appearances in programs along this tour.
As he notes regularly, it is the first symphony that starts in a dark minor key and ends in a more hopeful major.
Shelley makes the case that Canada's national orchestra performing the German composer's work to Korean and Japanese audiences does more to strengthen the ties that bind than emphasize the differences that divide.
'If we do it right, this man who lived in Germany a long time ago, whose life is completely different from ours, tapped into something that we can all recognize. When we connect with each other properly, we recognize this deep current that courses through human history. And that for me is what real cultural diplomacy is about.'
The tour included compositions by Canadians including Kelly-Marie Murphy, Keiko Devaux, and Oscar Peterson, while among the standout homegrown performers are the emerging British Columbia pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko and established violinist Adrian Anantawan from Ontario.
Shelley will leave his role as music director with NACO at the end of the 2025/26 season. After more than 10 years on the podium, he will become Music and Artistic Director of Pacific Symphony in California.
Shelley's words of advice for his eventual successor are to urge them to contemplate the question: 'Why an orchestra? What role does it serve?'
Michael Zarathus-Cook is a Toronto-based freelance writer, the chief editor of 'Cannopy Magazine,' and a medical student at the University of Toronto. The National Arts Centre sponsored his trip to South Korea and Japan.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6.