Masaaki Suzuki

Japanese conductor, organist, and harpsichordist (born 29 April 1954, Kobe), founder and music director of the Bach Collegium Japan, and one of the foremost living interpreters of the sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Suzuki trained in composition and organ at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music before completing soloist diplomas at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam under Ton Koopman and Piet Kee — a move prompted by an early teacher’s verdict that Japan then had no organs good enough to study on. He founded the Bach Collegium Japan in 1990 to bring European Baroque music, played on period instruments, to Japanese audiences, and has led the ensemble ever since through a landmark recording project for BIS Records: the complete Bach sacred cantatas (1995–2018, around 55 discs), the complete secular cantatas, and ongoing complete cycles of Bach’s organ and harpsichord works, alongside recordings of Handel, Mozart, and other eighteenth-century composers. He also teaches as Principal Guest Conductor of the Yale Schola Cantorum and Visiting Professor of Choral Conducting at Yale University. His honours include the German Cross of the Order of Merit (2001), the Bach Medal from Leipzig (2012), the Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize (2012), and the Suntory Music Prize (2014).

Core positions

• A Calvinist devoted to Lutheran sacred music, without contradiction. Suzuki credits Calvin with affirming ‘the value of the activity and culture of this world’ under a doctrine of general grace, which he treats as licensing full-blooded engagement with Bach’s Lutheran cantatas and passions.
• Translation is interpretive work, not a preliminary to it. He personally translated twenty to thirty Bach cantatas into Japanese, arguing that working out what a text means is inseparable from working out how to perform it.
• An instrument’s restoration history is part of its interpretation. His favourite organ, the Schnitger instrument at the Martinikerk in Groningen, matters to him as much for Jürgen Ahrend’s restoration toward its original character as for its original build.
• Productivity follows fascination, not strategy. Suzuki denies any deliberate approach to output — the sheer pull of Bach’s music, he says, is what keeps him working — and treats each recording as a milestone rather than a final word, open to being remade.
• Sacred music can move an audience independent of formal belief. Bach Collegium Japan’s annual Kobe performances of the St Matthew Passion draw thousands in a country where under two per cent of the population is Christian, which Suzuki reads as evidence the music’s message reaches beyond doctrinal adherence.

In the wiki

• Masaaki Suzuki on Interpreting Bach — conversation with Tyler Cowen on Bach interpretation, Calvinism and Lutheran sacred music, translation, historic organs, and a career built on fascination rather than productivity strategy