In stark contrast to yesterday, the second day of the Sapporo training camp is sunny and sunny, just like the typhoon had passed.

Today, we will be staying indoors and under the guidance of conductor Yanagisawa Toshio, as we intensively practice Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1, the main piece for the second concert.

The performance began at 8:00 a.m. with tuning led by Watanabe Masahiro, a second-year high school student who plays the role of head first violin, or concertmaster, but is also a woman and is known as the Concert Mistress, or "Conmistress" for short.

First, Yanagisawa said, "Let's start with the most difficult movement, the fourth movement."

Yes, this Mahler is difficult.

Until this song was decided,

First, we conducted a survey of all members to find out what songs they would like to play.

Although it was not the best piece in the tally, the members of the Tohoku Youth Orchestra felt that it would be suitable for their lineup, which has many brass and woodwind instruments and also has several percussionists, and from the conductor's standpoint, Yanagisawa also picked it out, saying, "If Tohoku Youth tries hard, I'm sure they can do it." This also matched well with representative and director Sakamoto Ryuichi, who thought a more modern piece would be better than the previous piece, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, also known as the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, and Mahler's first piece, "The Titan," was decided upon.

In order to make up for the delay caused by the typhoon yesterday, they made a quick start by practicing the 4th movement for just over an hour. Yanagisawa-san was also in high spirits wearing an original T-shirt designed by Shinro Ohtake.

At the beginning, the important role of hitting the cymbals with the timpani sticks is played by Yuune Hanzawa, a fifth-year student at a technical college who joined this year. The large drummer in the foreground is also a new member this season, and yesterday she was the earliest member of the group to get up at 4am and come from Kesennuma. The timing of the percussion is assisted by Iijima and Takeda from the office.

As you can see, Mahler's No. 1 is performed for two timpani, one of which was borrowed from the local Hokkaido University Symphony Orchestra, of which Kono Tsubasa, a second-year trombone student from Fukushima, is a member.

In addition, the Hokkaido University Orchestra has kindly lent us two double basses, a large drum, a tom-tom, and other large instruments. Kono-kun, who brought in his instruments alone yesterday before everyone arrived, and before the typhoon arrived, is the MVP of this training camp. Kono-kun is the second from the back of the TYO Horns lined up in a row.

By the way, the arrangement chart for this training camp was created by Yuto Nakamura, a second-year trumpet section leader at a university in Sendai, so I've attached it below. The members underlined in pink are the ones joining for the first time this year.

This time, I used the fisheye lens I brought with me to capture the entire group of members, which was no longer possible to capture on a smartphone.

As for the other timpani, we were able to borrow it from an unexpected company. When we asked the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, who have been providing full cooperation, if they could lend us a timpani in Sapporo, we were informed that there was a timpanist who worked for a local food service company called Ten Food Service and who personally owned an instrument, and that is how we ended up borrowing the instrument.

http://www.tenfood.co.jp

So, as a token of our appreciation, today's lunch was catered by "Miyoshino," a restaurant under their umbrella, "For gyoza and curry, choose "Miyoshino."

http://miyoshino-sapporo.jp

We all enjoyed this surrealist story of an encounter between gyoza and timpani in Sapporo, and refrained from any Ogiri-style structuralist commentary, such as the fact that both gyoza and timpani have skins, in a school-style setting.

Don't say something uncouth like, "When you think of Sapporo, you think of soup curry."

If you extinguish your mind, even the fire will feel cool. If you pour roux into the soup, it becomes soup curry! Just like curry rice and fukujinzuke, curry is also associated with gyoza.

While we were immersed in Mahler in the afternoon, Fukuda Taimei, a fifth-grade violinist from Fukushima who had been watching the practice yesterday because he had a stomachache, came over to tell us, "Seikou Gakuin is playing in the match."

Oh, is that so?

Unable to say, "Even the high school baseball game Toto Calcio has been banned at my company, so I've completely stopped watching it," he instead checked the progress of the game during his break.

The elementary school students seemed exhausted from the hard practice.

This is a match against Hokkaido High School in Sapporo, a local team, for a place in the top four. Iwate kids, Miyagi kids, big kids, small kids, all of them are cheering for Fukushima representatives, which is kind of like the Tohoku Youth Orchestra.

Yanagisawa Toshio also watched in a relaxed manner, saying, "I wondered what would happen, but it looks like we'll get through it somehow. It's quite impressive that we can get through it on our first practice at this age." Ah, "getting through" means playing a song from start to finish.

And it took us just over an hour to put together the final touches for today! There are still many areas we need to improve on, but it's amazing that we were able to get through it on the first practice session. Everyone, this is the starting line.

This is the end of the first part of today's report. If I have time, I'll update the second part today.