Harold C Schonberg once tried to sum up the skills that make up a great conductor. A maestro should, he said, be ‘many things: musician, administrator, executive, minister, psychologist, technician, philosopher’. He didn’t say anything about driving lorries. But it’s one of the first things that Kazuki Yamada mentions. He is talking about the early days of the Yokohama Sinfonietta, the orchestra that he co-founded in 1998 while still a student at the Tokyo University of the Arts. ‘I had to sort out the big instruments such as the timpani and the harp,’ he says. ‘Because there was no one else, I drove them myself in a two-ton truck. Of course, I don’t do it now – but I did do it.’
Yamada laughs, obviously delighted at the very idea that there’s hardly a job in a modern symphony orchestra that he hasn’t done. We’re used to
