One of Japan’s great orchestras marks its 80th birthday with a rare London visit, bringing a jazz legend to the piano for Rachmaninov’s most dazzling set of variations and one of Tchaikovsky’s most triumphant symphonies.

Founded in 1947 and now celebrating its 80th anniversary, the Osaka Philharmonic crosses Europe this summer under Tadaaki Otaka, its Music Director since 2018. British audiences know him well: Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales for eight years and now its Conductor Laureate, he is a devoted Elgarian whose recorded symphony cycles with the Osaka players have won wide acclaim. The orchestra opens with a calling card from home. Toru Takemitsu wrote music for almost a hundred films, and his Three Film Scores for strings distil three of them: a jazz-tinged portrait of a New York boxer, a grave, hushed elegy for the survivors of Hiroshima in Black Rain, and a bittersweet waltz that could almost have drifted in from a Viennese café.

Rachmaninov took the most fiendish of Paganini’s violin caprices and spun 24 variations from it, with the Dies irae funeral chant stalking the piano and, at its heart, the famous 18th variation that simply turns Paganini’s tune upside down and finds one of the most ravishing melodies ever written. Makoto Ozone is a pianist like no other. Self-taught in jazz in his native Kobe, a Berklee graduate and Grammy nominee, he came to the concerto repertoire via Gershwin and Bernstein and has since played Rachmaninov with orchestras from New York to Hamburg, bringing an improviser’s freedom and flair to every bar.

The evening ends with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, in which a sombre ‘fate’ theme is transformed across four movements, by way of a heart-stopping horn melody and a graceful waltz, into a blazing march of victory.

“…thrilling, virtuosic, and unabashedly personal” The New York Times on Makoto Ozone