Berkeley Symphony pianist Shunsuke Kurakata says his mother always wanted to play the piano but never realized her dream. Instead, she made sure all three of her sons got piano lessons. “I didn’t have the courage to say, ‘I don’t want to go to my piano lesson,’” quips Shunsuke, who says he loved playing the piano but did not like to practice. When he was 13 he moved from a teacher who lived in his family’s Tokyo neighborhood to one of the teachers at the Tokyo Fine Arts University, where he would eventually take his B.A. in music.
Though he studied the Western tradition as a student in Japan, Shunsuke says it wasn’t until he studied in Germany and traveled a bit in Europe that the tradition made sense to him. In particular he remembers looking up at the stained-glass windows at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on his first day in Europe. The experience was a revelation, he says, and it was then that he began to understand the musical tradition he had been studying.
After spending nearly three years in Germany, Shunsuke paid a visit to a cousin in San Francisco and was able to get a student visa to do graduate work at San Francisco State, where he met Maestro Nagano and several other musicians with whom he would later play in the Berkeley Symphony.
By the time he graduated from State, Shunsuke was actively involved in the Bay Area music scene, and in 1987 he was interviewed for a New York Times article on foreign citizens living in the United States. A Japanese-language newspaper in Los Angeles reprinted the article, and his high school sweetheart’s mother read it and showed it to her daughter, violinist Yukiko Kamei.
Yukiko contacted Shunsuke, and they began to see each other. Two years later, in February of 1989, Yukiko soloed with the Berkeley Symphony in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and on the following day she and Shunsuke were married at Kent Nagano’s home.
Shunsuke has particularly fond memories of the two occasions on which Olivier Messiaen and his wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod, visited the Bay Area to assist the orchestra in preparing The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ and From the Canyons to the Stars. On the latter occasion Shunsuke accompanied the maestro on a visit to Bryce Canyon to better understand the area that inspired Messiaen to write the work. “It was amazing to see the hard work that Kent put into preparing those most difficult pieces,” says Shunsuke. “It was really impressive and inspiring.”
Shunsuke has appeared as a soloist with the Berkeley Symphony in Toru Takemitsu’s River Run and the Beethoven Triple Concerto. He served as music director of the Japanese Contemporary Music Festival at the Asian Art Museum from 1982 to 1992, has performed widely around the Bay Area, and maintains an active teaching schedule. He and Yukiko, now a member of the San Francisco Symphony, live in San Francisco with their three children.
—Richard Reynolds, June 2005
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