Specialities

Phoning in from Frankfurt—he’s there getting a visa ahead of his conducting debut at La Scala—Kazuki Yamada radiates positivity down the Zoom call. An extremely popular conductor in Birmingham, where he is currently City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director and artistic advisor, it was recently announced that Yamada would succeed Robin Ticciati as the Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, beginning in 2026.

Yamada follows many esteemed conductors whose break came in Birmingham: Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Andris Nelsons, and, most recently, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Formalizing a relationship that began with Yamada as a guest conductor over a decade ago, he was dealt a mixed hand when eventually got the top job. The positives were that he’d inherited a great orchestra, one of the finest acoustics in Europe in the Symphony Hall, and a strong civic tradition of over a century of municipal funding for orchestras. The negatives were financial; it’s been a pretty bleak time for Birmingham’s arts scene. The city council declared itself effectively bankrupt in September 2023; in the following March, as part of book-balancing, the council approved cuts believed to be the largest in UK local authority history. The CBSO’s council grant went, eventually, to zero. Though representing a small part of their annual income, in straitened times for the UK arts scene, losing a few hundred thousand pounds is a huge blow.

While much has been made of the national picture of arts funding in the UK, it’s at a local level where the cuts are particularly concerning. Council budget cuts enforced by years of restricted funding from the central government have gradually eroded support for institutions like the CBSO. It’s not just a UK thing though, and Yamada enters a Berlin cultural scene currently considering its own existential (if much less severe) funding crisis.

At the end of our call, Yamada apologized for his spoken English. In a short interview, we spoke about his plans for the DSO, Eurocentrism, which parts of England feel close to God, and the importance of finding specialities.