PMF News 2024.7.3

PMF News - Summer 2024

As the seasons steadily progress, Sapporo is enjoying its characteristic early summer, with mild temperatures, a little rain, and lots of sunshine. PMF 2024 artists, faculty, and Academy will start arriving soon! We are thrilled to welcome them.

Introducing PMF 2024 Academy members

With the opening of PMF 2024 fast approaching, we would like to introduce to you the 85 members of this year’s Academy, representing 25 countries/regions. They will perform throughout the festival in various chamber music configurations, and also all come together to form the PMF Orchestra! The harmony created by a group with such a diverse range of backgrounds is perhaps the most unique aspect of PMF.
On the PMF Academy members page, you can learn a bit about each of them, and even enjoy some of their solo performance videos!

PMF in their own words

Alexander Hanna

This ongoing series features messages from PMF faculty members and more, who tell us what PMF means to them. In this edition, Alexander Hanna has kindly shared his thoughts with us. Hanna is the principal double bassist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and has been a PMF faculty member since 2016.

PMF is a non-profit organization, sustained by the generosity of individuals like you. It provides a uniquely multicultural learning environment for young musicians from all over the world, increasing international mutual understanding alongside musicianship.
Please consider making a donation to help sustain the work of the festival.

Reserve chartered round-trip transportation
to the Picnic Concert on Tripadvisor!

The Picnic Concert Experience in Sapporo Art Park is now officially listed on Tripadvisor, one of the world’s largest online travel agencies. This travel package offers visitors from outside Japan the opportunity to experience a signature PMF event held in the lush natural environment of the Sapporo Art Park, where PMF-founder Leonard Bernstein gave his legendary opening speech in 1990.
The package includes a Picnic Concert ticket with access to both a chair near the stage and the lawn, a PMF 2024 T-Shirt, and a chartered round-trip bus ride! Reservations can be made through July 24!

Details are also available from the PMF website here

PMF FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION / Aleck Belcher, double bass / PMF 2018

An ongoing series of interviews with PMF alumni and faculty, this issue and the next will feature interviews with 2 alumni － a student and teacher: Aleck Belcher (double bass, PMF 2018), currently Assistant Principal double bass with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and his teacher Kurt Muroki (double bass, PMF 1993, 94), Professor of Music at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. In this issue we introduce Aleck and his thoughts on PMF.

What made you apply for PMF?

I applied to PMF because I thought the faculty were impressive. As a Midwestern American, I rarely get to work with Europeans, so I was eager to play alongside musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic. The Viennese style of bass playing is fairly different from what I’m accustomed to as a French bow-playing American, so I was able to see my technique from a unique perspective by working with Michael Bladerer in masterclass and bass sectionals. My teacher, Kurt Muroki, always told me how much he enjoyed working with Alois Posch at PMF in 1993, so the Viennese pedagogy was a big selling point for me. Prior to applying, I had also taken a few lessons with Alex Hanna and knew he was a great teacher and player. He was another reason I auditioned, and I learned a lot sitting behind him as we rehearsed Mahler 7 with Valery Gergiev.
Coincidentally, I have always had a casual interest in urban planning and walkable cities. In general, Japanese cities are impressively well-planned and highly navigable on foot, bike, and transit. This is in stark contrast to many American cities that are heavily car-dependent and hostile to pedestrians. So, another incentive to apply to PMF was the opportunity to ride Shinkansen and visit Tokyo.

Is there any difference between the way you thought of PMF before you participated and how you think of it now?

Before I attended PMF, I envisioned it like any other festival I’d attended: wake up, go to rehearsal, play in masterclass, rinse and repeat. I did not anticipate that it would be an amazing cultural experience. I have to thank the Harmony volunteers for dressing us in kimono―it is one of my favorite memories from PMF. We always joked that later in our lives, we’d return to PMF as Harmony volunteers.

What do you hope the next generation of young musicians will take away from their time at PMF?

I hope that future PMF attendees eat lots of Japanese curry and cherish their time in a one-of-a-kind international orchestra.

From our alumni around the globe

Luis Cabrera (PMF 2004, 06 / Principal Double Bass with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra) was featured in the previous Spring edition, and he has since kindly shared some photos from his time at PMF (top-left, below). Even now, the Japanese cultural activities presented by PMF volunteer-group “Harmony” are highly popular with the Academy each year, many of them visiting Japan for the first time. They can try on a kimono, experience the Japanese tea ceremony, make some handcrafts, and even experience traditional Japanese music.

Tomás Cotik (PMF 2006), violin professor at Portland State University’s School of Music and Theater, also kindly shared his recent activities with us. Tomás lived in Spain as a Fulbright Scholar researcher during the 2023-24 academic year, with residency programs in Madrid, Zaragoza, Murcia, and Barcelona, where he worked on multiple musical projects.

He released 2 albums － one featuring the music of Piazzolla, recorded for Naxos and paying homage to his native Buenos Aires, and the other featuring transcriptions of Bach’s Cello Suites for violin － and an experimental digital music experience, in his words, “an augmented reality, three-dimensional musical performance accessible via smartphone.” To read an interview about some of these projects, and much more, visit his website: tomascotik.com

We always appreciate updates from our alumni active around the world!

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Pacific Music Festival Organizing Committee
https://www.pmf.or.jp/en/
Sumitomo Seimei Sapporo Chuo Bldg.
1F 1-14, Minami 2 jo, Higashi 1 chome, Chuo-ku, Sapporo 060-0052
TEL: +81-11-242-2211　FAX: +81-11-242-1687

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