Jon Nakamatsu & The Jazz Age opens the Symphony San Jose season this weekend, but Nakamatsu certainly is not forsaking classical music. Neither is San Jose’s primary professional orchestra.
For Nakamatsu, a San Jose native who won the Van Cliburn competition in 1997 to gain his status as a world-class piano virtuoso, it’s another chance to help his hometown symphony orchestra lure the crowds that haven’t returned since the pandemic caused a two-year pause.
The orchestra is using programming diversity to attract what executive director Robert Massey calls “a whole new audience” by adding pieces of pop to most concerts. Nakamatsu is happy to help, as usual.
“We have to take what’s happening in the profession as a whole and hope that every big or little organization contributes to the longevity of the art,” Nakamatsu says. He demonstrated that early on with his benefit performance for the old San Jose Symphony, which folded anyway in 2002, and his performance of the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 in 2014 with Symphony Silicon Valley, which thrived as a part-time orchestra from 2003 until the pandemic set in.
This weekend’s performances—Oct. 5 at 7:30pm and Oct. 6 at 2:30pm—at which Nakamatsu is playing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Aaron Copland’s jazzy piano concerto, also includes Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and Maurice Ravel’s popular “Bolero.”
But if you’re worried that Nakamatsu’s career has gone off-track, fear not.
“The career continues,” says Nakamatsu, 56, who has a wife and son in the Bay Area. ”I continue to work year round with little breaks here and there. It’s all concert stuff. Mostly orchestras. It’s sort of a blessing and a curse. It’s a struggle to keep up sometimes.”
Aside from symphony orchestra gigs, Nakamatsu tours frequently with clarinetist Jon Manasse, and they have been co-artistic directors of the Cape Cod (Chamber) Music Festival since 2007. “Every August, I get to be an administrator, which is something I thought I‘d never be doing.”
He does record. Now he and Manasse are working on “Down and Dirty,” by Canadian composer Vivian Fung.
Nakamatsu also teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory and has recently begun teaching a class at Stanford, “this seminar called the Piano Forum,” which is not restricted to musicians.
In some ways, this weekend’s concert is a lark for Nakamatsu.
“I love it because it is so not what I do. It’s related in a way, but very separate. It has demands that are very exclusive. What I’m doing this week, it’s not real jazz. I play music that is by and large ‘classical,’ and that incorporates elements of another genre.
“The best example of this is Gershwin. You have to ask yourself ‘What Is Gershwin?’ It’s not exactly 100 percent classical, it’s not 100 percent jazz. There are elements of show music, elements that coalesce. There’s some kind of voice you might even call just American.”
Still, it isn’t European, not quite some people’s definition of classical music. Symphony San Jose’s programming this season is a mix that has some Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but also an evening of film scores and a trippy version of Holst’s “The Planets.”
There’s something for everyone. There’s even a 55-minute version of the “Nutcracker” aimed at toddlers.
Some may disapprove. Will we ever hear Hindemith and Mahler again?
Nakamatsu says those choices aren’t going away. “Maybe Hindemith will still be playing in San Francisco and you still can have a chance to hear it.”
Nor does he feel he’s being strong-armed into increasing the amount of pop music in his own career.
ºI always thought it would be fun to do something that’s not necessarily what I do. I just don’t know how good I’d be at it. In my current world, in my personal career, I feel like I’m hired for what I want to do, hired for what I’m known to do, and that’s the classical music repertoire. That speaks to me more personally than any other genre.”
For Nakamatsu, it’s all about keeping the classical part going, no matter what it takes.
“Things are cyclical,” he says. “Repertory that was popular got lost (and found). That may happen again.”
Jon Nakamatsu: Jazz Age takes over the California Theatre in downtown San Jose on Oct. 5 at 7:30pm and Oct. 6 at 2:30pm. Tickets: $24-$122. symphonysanjose.org
