One of Japan’s finest orchestras, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra offers a remarkably extensive season over the next 12 months, boasting appearances from some of the classical music world’s premier guest conductors and soloists, as well as the cream of Japan’s classical music talent. With subscriptions available into 2027, we take a survey of highlights in this multifaceted season, too broad to be fully captured in a small preview.
One clear highlight comes immediately: in November this year, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony’s Music Director Kazushi Ono conducts a new production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at Tokyo’s New National Theatre. Regarded as Berg’s masterpiece, this classic of modern opera is still relatively rarely heard in Japan. With an international cast led by Thomas Johannes Mayer in the title role, the production is by Richard Jones, director of many operas including, most recently, the much-acclaimed Covent Garden production of Mark-Anthony Turnage Festen.
Ono’s other conducting dates through 2026 are relatively few, but each will be worth hearing. In March, he reunites the TMSO with the New National Theatre Chorus for a vocal outing, including Britten’s Spring Symphony. Cherry blossoms continue to bloom when Ono conducts Mendelssohn’s sunny “Italian” Symphony a few days later, joined by Gautier Capuçon for Elgar’s Cello Concerto. (Cello enthusiasts in Tokyo would be wise to catch Ono’s September 2026 appearance too, when he conducts Strauss’ Don Quixote, featuring Yu Ito, the orchestra’s principal cellist.)
Kazuhiro Koizumi is the TMSO’s Honorary Conductor for Life and another major figure in the Japanese orchestral world. He conducts several concerts across the season, including Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony this coming December. (Fumiaki Miura joins for Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.) Then in April, Koizumi returns for a strong Beethovenian strand in the TMSO’s season, conducting Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies, as well as the Ninth Symphony in December. In the same month he also conducts Liszt’s challenging and rarely heard Dante Symphony, certainly a concert for fans of adventurous Romantic music.
Beethoven’s Ninth is a permanent fixture of Japanese orchestral life at the end of the year. December 2025 sees the TMSO perform it with Sascha Goetzel, one of many guest conductors to appear with the orchestra this season. In January, the TMSO’s Milan-born Principal Guest Conductor Daniele Rustioni makes an appearance for two programmes, featuring a mix of high German and south-European fare: Brahms and Wagner, vs Respighi and Verdi (with Rimsky-Korsakov’s touristic Capriccio espagnol thrown in for good measure). Italian-American violinist Francesca Dego joins for Brahms’ Violin Concerto.
As if to demonstrate the TMSO’s cosmopolitan European code-switching, talented young British conductor Ben Glassberg arrives shortly after to conduct the orchestra in Mel Bonis and Ravel, as well as Bartók’s fiendishly challenging Concerto for Orchestra. As if this weren’t enough, only a few days later the orchestra will perform Mahler’s gargantuan Eighth Symphony, conducted by veteran Eliahu Inbal. Remarkably, these performances coincide Inbal’s 90th birthday. (Indeed, the irrepressible Inbal is scheduled to conduct Mahler’s Seventh in February 2027, as well as Bruckner’s early Symphony in F minor, at the age of 91.)
Music and musicians of Nordic extraction are also strongly featured of the TMSO season this year. Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen makes a guest appearance in March (for a programme including Prokofiev’s “Fiery Angel” Third Symphony), shortly followed by Osmo Vänskä for a quintessientially Finnish programme of Sibelius’ First and Fourth Symphonies. Kaija Saariaho’s orchestra work Maan varjot (“Earth’s Shadows”) will also be heard the following month, in a programme conducted by Kirill Karabits.
Perhaps the standout events of the Summer 2026 will be future Chief Conductor Pekka Kuusisto’s appearance in June, to lead the orchestra from the violin in two programmes. The first includes music by Haydn and Rautavaara, while the second includes Japanese premieres from Swedish composers Andrea Hilberg Tarrodi and Anders Hillborg, alongside always-essential Sibelius. Shortly following this, in July, Susanna Mälkki conducts Bartók’s dreamlike one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, one of the great music dramas of the 20th century. (The Finnish strand doesn’t even end here: a few days later, pianist Janne Mertanen arrives to play Chopin, together with young conducting talent Mikael Loponen, again for Sibelius.)
Another Japanese premiere worth catching in Spring 2026 will be John Adams’ Naïve and Sentimental Music – perhaps the composer’s best work for orchestra alone. Challenging and lyrical, it will be conducted by Adams himself, who pairs it with Ives’ miniature masterpiece The Unanswered Question, as well as Adams’ own choral-orchestral Harmonium, which sets John Donne and Emily Dickinson in outlandishly gargantuan fashion.
Listeners with an interest in modern music should make a date for a concert later in the summer, which includes works by two noted Japanese composers of the 20th century: Akira Miyoshi and Teizo Matsumura. Both contemporaries of Takemitsu, their music can be lyric and poetic (indeed Matsumura was also a poet), but also can be dissonant and shocking (for example, Akira Miyoshi’s Concerto for Orchestra). Alongside a similarly brash orchestral work of Miyoshi’s, veteran Japanese conductor Tadaaki Otaka conducts pianist Tomoki Kitamura in Matsumura’s Piano Concerto no. 2 (1978), a work of great ability, depicting grand, large-scale orchestral landscapes. The programme is completed by Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
The TMSO’s subscription season continues into the Autumn and Winter of 2026, with notable appearances by several standout guest conductors: Jonathan Nott conducts Beethoven and Bruckner, as well as Stravinsky’s recently rediscovered Chant funèbre and Scriabin’s cataclysmic Poem of Ecstasy. Marc Minkowski also makes an appearance to conduct Bruckner, and Beethoven returns too in the capable hands of Piotr Anderszewski, who performs the “Emperor” Concerto with guest conductor Jun Märkl. Before the end-of-year celebrations are inaugurated with Beethoven’s Ninth, the TMSO’s November performances of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Second Symphony, under the baton of Daniele Rustioni, will also be worth catching.
See upcoming events from Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.
This article was sponsored by Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.
