Masaaki Suzuki: preference

Transcript context

…How was it you decided to study early music in the Netherlands? Was it just you wanted to study music and then you learned of the movement? Or you went there because of the movement? No. Actually, I was completely fascinated by the organ itself. That’s why I started to play organ, and I got lessons when I was a teenager before university. Then I wanted to study more organ. My first organ teacher was a Belgian priest, actually, in Osaka. I told him that I wanted to be an organist and so on. “But listen, Masaaki, there are no good organs in Japan at all, so that is not a good idea to study organ here in Japan. Why don’t you study composition?” So, I did study composition in the university. That was a very good career, very good process to understand the music. Then in between, I just happened to meet the harpsichordist called Motoko Nabeshima, Japanese, the first-generation harpsichordist who studied with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam. She was a really genius person. She spoke more than six languages in Europe, and she had spent quite a long time in Europe. She came back to Japan, and I met her, and I got a lesson from her. That really changed my life. She introduced me to Ton Koopman, who was a schoolmate of hers. They were together in Gustav Leonhardt’s class. I went to Amsterdam, and I went to the Ton Koopman concert on the day of my arrival. That was a really shocking world, so fresh and so exciting. I decided to come to Amsterdam, and that was a very good decision, I thought. If you started with the organ and harpsichord, how was it, then, you came to conducting?…

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