Key participation
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Franz Liszt (1811 -1886)
Masaru Okada was born in 1974 in
Music lovers and piano fans around
the world enjoyed the thrilling per
formance of young pianist Masaru Okada
on the International Rabobank Tour,
the first public concert series the bank has
sponsored. The tour included nine
concerts in Indonesia, Germany, the
Netherlands, the US, the UK and Switzer-
land, in October and November of last
year. Okada was the winner of the fifth
International Franz Liszt Piano Competi-
tion, of which Rabobank has acted as
main sponsor since its creation in 1986.
The competition was started by a group
of Liszt fans including the Dutch Liszt
Society, at the
Vredenburg
Music Centre in
Utrecht in order
to commemo-
rate the lOOth
year of Liszt's
death. Truc to an ongoing commitment to
cultural events, and a belief in talent,
ambition and in the need for its fulfill-
ment, Rabobank was happy to support
such a project. Today the competition
ranks among the top in the piano world
along with the Van Cliburn and the
Arthur Rubinstein competitions. As an
extension of our support to the competi
tion, the tour provided a valuable oppor-
tunity to further "harmonious" cliënt
relations. In the program for the London
concert, London branch manager
John I.ake summed up our involvement:
'From our history we know that eoopera-
tion between commerce and culture adds
value to the activities of both. Our
commitment to the development of young
talent represents our investment in a
prosperous future for all'.
Celebrating music: Jürg R. Reinshagen,
President of the Foundation Council of the
International Festival of Music, Irina Flaefliger,
Fleinz D. Zimmer, CEO Robeco Switzeriand,
pianist Masuru Okada, Quinten Peelen,
Executive Director of the International
Franz Liszt Competition, Utrecht and on the
far right Michael Haefiinger, intendant of the
International Music Festival, Lucerne.
Fukuoka, Japan. He began studying the piano at
an early age and won several prestigious prizes
in Japan before pursuing his studies in Europe. Okada studied with Hans Leygraf at the Mozarteum in
Salzburg, Austria, and later at the Hochschule für Künste in Berlin. In 1997 he won First Prize in the
Arthur Schnabel Competition in Berlin and the Steinway Förderpreis. Directly after winning the Liszt
Competition, Okada played in 25 concert halls in the Netherlands and Belgium before embarking on the
Rabobank Tour. Says the Jarkarta Post of Okada, 'his awesome technical command always served to
realize the music to the highest order. Much tribute to this fantastic performance'.
Hungarian composer and virtuoso
pianist. A major musical sensation
of his time, Liszt was influential as a
composer of difficult music, primarily
for the keyboard, but also of orchestral,
chamber, operatic, and vocai music.
Liszt was not only the greatest pianist of
his age - revolutionizing piano tech-
nique and giving the first complete
"piano recital" in a full evening - but he
also crcatcd the one-movement
symphonic form (the symphonic poern)
and an advanced harmonie palette that
anticipated by many ycars the harmonie
language of Claude Debussy, Béla
Bartók, and Arnold Schoenberg. In
addition, he invented the compositional
technique of the "transformation of
themes", in which all the motifs in a
work are derived from a single idea -
pre-dating Richard Wagner's "lcitmotif"
and Schocnberg's use of one tone-row
for an entire piece.
