Tokkyu Grand Concerto 2026
Date and time: Sunday, August 30, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. (doors open at 1:00 p.m.)
Venue: The Symphony Hall
Conductor: Sachio Fujioka
Orchestra: Kansai Philharmonic Orchestra
Program (in performance order)
Syu Katayama: Piano Concerto (newly commissioned work; world premiere)
Piano and composition: Syu Katayama
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18
Piano: Miyu Shindo
Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23
Piano: Yukine Kuroki

The seating capacities of Osaka’s four principal concert halls are as follows.
Festival Hall: 2,700
The Symphony Hall: 1,704 regular seats
The maximum capacity is 1,845, including 58 auxiliary seats and standing room for 83 people.
Sumitomoseimei Izumi Hall: 821 seats (713 on the first floor and 108 on the second floor)
Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance The Phoenix Hall: 301 regular seats, or a maximum of 335 with additional seating
Auxiliary seats were also made available yesterday, so for the purposes of this essay, I shall regard yesterday’s audience as having numbered 1,845.
I can say without hesitation that the first work on yesterday’s program—Syu Katayama’s Piano Concerto, a newly commissioned work receiving its world premiere, composed and performed at the piano by Syu Katayama—was the finest composition of this century.
Everything was perfect.
Everything was beautiful.
Yet, in reality, only around 1,800 people heard this supreme masterpiece of the twenty-first century.
Virtually none of Japan’s 120 million people know anything about it.
Still less do the world’s seven billion people.
Indeed, I myself learned of Syu Katayama only yesterday.
Until then, I had known absolutely nothing about him.
The circumstances are surely the same for the majority of Japan’s 120 million people and for the world’s seven billion people.
Even I, who was fortunate enough to be present in the audience, may, given the present state of Japan’s classical music world, never be able to hear this work again.
Could there be any stranger phenomenon in an age when every conceivable technology has advanced and even AI has appeared?
There was once a time when audiophiles throughout the world knew that the performance and technology of Japanese audio equipment were the finest in the world.
This was overwhelmingly the case.
And yesterday, in that very Japan, the greatest composer and the greatest musical masterpiece of the twenty-first century emerged.
Moreover, it happened at The Symphony Hall, one of the finest concert halls in Japan in terms of acoustics.
Yesterday, for the first time, I entered the hall one hour before the performance began.
From my own seat, where I was sitting for the first time, and from my close friend’s seat on the second floor, I surveyed the hall in its entirety.
Until then, I had merely looked at the seating area and the stage.
Needless to say, a concert hall embodies the finest achievements of architectural and engineering technology.
This is especially true in Japan.
Throughout Japan, in cities and towns across the entire country, there are concert halls of astonishing excellence.
There is no other country like it anywhere in the world.
That is why brilliant classical musicians are now emerging from every part of Japan like a galaxy of stars.
Until recently, when I learned the truth through Yoichi Takahashi’s YouTube program, I had grouped this phenomenon together under the dismissive label of so-called “hakomono administration”—public spending devoted to constructing facilities.
The reality, however, was different.
Throughout the world, major cities have continued to grow larger and wealthier.
Japan, however, has followed a different course.
While the rest of the world has poured infrastructure investment and every other kind of resource and funding into its major cities, Japan has directed its money not toward its major cities, but toward its regional communities.
As a result, the world’s major cities have become wealthier, while Japan’s major cities have become poorer.
Japan’s regional communities have become wealthier.
Takahashi explained this while presenting the relevant graphs.
It was not merely “hakomono administration.”
Japan’s regional cities have received funding so abundant that they have been able to build concert halls of the highest quality.
That is why magnificent concert halls exist throughout Japan, in every corner of the country.
The first work on yesterday’s program—Syu Katayama’s Piano Concerto, a newly commissioned work receiving its world premiere, composed and performed at the piano by Syu Katayama—can, without the slightest exaggeration, be called the supreme masterpiece of the twenty-first century.
Does Japan not possess the technology to record that entire performance while preserving the sound and resonance of the concert hall exactly as they were?
Quite the contrary.
It is precisely Japan that possesses such technology.
It is merely that those involved in classical music have, almost without exception, failed to make use of it in this way.
Perhaps the performance was, in fact, recorded.
For some reason, however, those involved in Japan’s classical music world appear to have had no passion for delivering a historic performance to the country’s 120 million people as swiftly as possible.
They have shown no passion for conveying to the world the great performances of Japan’s classical musicians and orchestras.
To be continued.