Peta Stewart
Starting ballet at the age of three, learning to play the violin at age of four, and the piano at the age of five (and giving up ballet at the age of six and the piano at the age of seven, although she had to take it up again in high school) may sound as though Ryoko Yano knew how her world would evolve. Wrong!
Ryoko, who is in town to perform the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto No. 3 with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra in its Summer Festival on Thursday, 22 January, didn’t take the violin seriously, even though she had been picking out Mozart’s Turkish March on her mother’s piano at the age of two, until she was entered for music competitions when she was nine.
Another reason, she says, is because there was no classical music in her small town and her only exposure to concerts was “on the little black box (TV) providing classical concerts in music programmes and children’s educational ones. To me that was also so unreal. They couldn’t be real people!”.
Conservatoire in Paris
Of course when she won the opportunity to study at the age of 19 at the Conservatoire in Paris with the French virtuoso violinist Jean-Jacques Kantorow some years later, she realised how mistaken she had been!
Winning her first competitions at the age of nine, then 10, then the regional finals of a Japanese one when she was 11 (she broke her A string just hours before her appearance in Mozart’s concert in A – a new string takes days to stabilise so she needed to improvise with new fingerings, but without that stress who knows if she would have won!), but it wasn’t till her school work suffered even though she spent less time than her friends on her violin than they did that she finally grasped the fact that she would play the violin for life.
“I didn’t sacrifice my childhood as so many did because it wasn’t my choice to practice 10 hours a day and neither did my parents insist on it. Even so, I have regretted making music my career many times,” she laughs, “because I am sure that life if I had followed my second choice to be a lawyer, would have been much easier.” Her laugh also gives away the fact that she wasn’t really being serious!
One competition led to another and “playing well made me feel good, winning even better and the result was that I always wanted to do better,” she says. She certainly did – she won the International Music Competition of Geneva, the Tibor Varga Competition, the Jeunesse Musicales Competition in Belgrade, numerous national Japanese Competition and as well as special prizes at the Sendai Competition and the Jacques Thibaud Competition.
One teacher led to another and she first moved to Tokyo from her island near Osaka and then to Paris.
Luxembourg Symphony Orchestra
Ryoko, who speaks perfect English, French and Japanese, lives in France on the border with Luxembourg where she is a member of the Luxembourg Symphony Orchestra, her first (and last) job, from where she performs as a soloist and chamber musician. She joined the orchestra in 2017, after a friend told her she shouldn’t spend her life as a free lance musician and applied to several orchestras on her behalf! She had never been an orchestral musician so this was something new for her but clearly she was able to show her abilities as a leader.
The concerto she will play with the CPO, the 3rd Violin Concerto by Saint-Saëns with Jonathan Lo on the podium is one of the first she ever performed in public and she now has some 30 concertos in her repertoire.
“It’s French, and it is a lot about what France means to me. It’s easy to listen to – from the first bars with strings then one with timpani joining – only four bars before the solo starts – is accessible, nostalgic, Romantic and takes me back to my childhood. There’s a dramatic side and it has lovely harmonies, and technically this concerto is easy to listen to, unlike e Alban Berg) and is not as serious as Beethoven or as sweet and romantic like Tchaikovsky. It’s like champagne”. Or in this case like South African MCC!
Although she gave up learning the piano “which gave me perspective from an accompanist’s point of view”, she continues to play a little. “I don’t feel guilty about playing the piano badly. I do when I play the violin badly!”
What’s clear about Ryoko is that she is not afraid to try anything and she turns to reading when she is motivated to do so. “I keep trying to read – first in English which I endure a little longer. Then I turn to Japanese. I also keep trying to restart running.” Then of course there’s here five-year-old daughter to look after!
She also teaches a little, and loves chamber music and just before coming here was involved in recitals with a horn and piano that focused on English music. Good thing that she will be giving a concert with the Tchaikovsky Trio with Megan-Geoffrey Prins (piano) and cellist Peter Martens in the Strand on Friday, January 23. It was Peter who introduced her to the CPO after he met her at a chamber music festival in France last year.
The dress rehearsal for the CPO concert on the same day is open to the public at 11:00. There will be a pre-concert talk open to concertgoers at 18:45.
Who: Violinist Ryoko Yano Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra; in recital
Where Cape Town City Hall; Beach Road, The Strand
When: 22 January, 19:30; 23 January, 2026, 16:00
Concert tickets: CPO: Artscape Dial-A-Seat 021 421 7695: Here
Chamber Music at The Strand: jacksonrv@hotmail.co.uk
Dress rehearsal tickets: Here
WS
