Great Saiya Mandolin Ensemble – A young Mandolin Orchestra from Japan

The Great Saiya Mandolin Ensemble is a young Japanese mandolin ensemble. After only 5 years the orchestra has already reached a high standard.

The fifth regular concert of the Great Saiya Mandolin Ensemble was given on Oct. 2nd. The complete concert was streamed by ustream and has also been recorded. The videos of the concert are now available at ustream.

This orchestra plays with a lot of energy. The program was mainly composed of Japanese compositions of recent years and therefore is very interesting.

At the moment the 3rd piece of the concert was taken out from the video, it is planned to make it available as soon as the permission by the composer was given.

For me this concert was very interesting. It gives a great impression about new developements in the mandolin music in Japan of today.

The concert has been recorded completely including the intermission. You can skip the intermission of the second part and jump directly to the beginning of the second part – the time of the beginning of the pieces is given in the comment.

Program:

1. Sulla Piana della Melia, Ouverture per Estudiantina / Giuseppe Manente/arranged by Jiro Nakano
2. Prelude 2 / Hidenori Yoshimizu
3. Spirit of Planet – for mandolin orchestra / Daigo Marumoto (zur Zeit nicht verfügabr)
4. Ride!　 / S.Hazo/arranged by GSME
5. Piano concerto No.1 “Anti-Ares” / V. Wakkmaninov/arranged by GSME
6. Fate of the Gods　　/ S. Reineke / arranged by GSME
7. Prima Ballata: Allegro capriccioso from “Ballata sinfonica” / Akira Ifukube
8. Arsnova　Suite / Kenji Suehiro・Daigo Marumoto

Encore: Tong-poo / Ryuichi Sakamoto

Enjoy the 5th concert of the Great Saiya Mandolin Ensemble!

(I had first embedded the ustream videos, but I had the impression that this did not work properly – the videos started loding and playing automatically although this was not wanted – so I have replaced the embedded videos by the links to the videos)