A Piece of Work : Despite All-Employee Makeup, Toshiba Philharmonic Orchestra, Which Plays Irvine Next Week, Has a Professional Air About It

When it comes to music, Toshiba means business.

In fact, it means about 100 employees of the huge Tokyo-based electronics and high technology company, whose Toshiba Philharmonic Orchestra is about to begin its first U.S. tour.

It’s a short tour--only four concerts--but includes stops at Carnegie Hall and in Nashville. The tour begins with sold-out concerts Monday and Tuesday in Irvine and ends May 6 in New York.

Seigo Kashiwagi, 49, a founder of the orchestra and now principal cellist and music director, was reached by phone earlier this week in Tokyo. He immediately made sure there was no confusion regarding the title “music director.”

“In Japan, that means inspector, I make sure of performing grade,” Kashiwagi said. “Not a conductor--but a conductor because I am from Toshiba!”

Get it? Electrical conductor? “It is a joke,” he added with a chuckle.

Toshiba already had a baseball league when Kashiwagi met in 1989 with a co-worker, a flutist, who proposed an employee-only orchestra. With 70,000 Toshiba employees in the Tokyo area, they figured it might be easy to organize, and they knew of a 20-member chamber orchestra that had been formed at another company.

“We were thinking of more than 50 for a symphony orchestra,” Kashiwagi said. “How to gather the members, we thought. We chose a way. But it was not the normal way.”

Indeed. First, they decided where they wanted to play, and they reserved the Pablo Casals Hall in Tokyo. Next they settled on what they would play: several works by Mozart. Then they asked Yoshinori Kawachi to lead them.

“Nice concert hall, nice program, nice conductor--[it was the] reverse order” of the usual process of starting with an orchestra and conductor, proceeding with programming and finally booking a hall for a concert. Last, announcement of an employee orchestra was made in the company newsletter.

“It was a new concept,” Kashiwagi said. “No [full-size] employee orchestra existed at the time. How many people would gather? More than 30 people came to the first rehearsal. Fifty played at Casals Hall. When news of the concert was published in the company report, more people called to join, more than 80. In one year we had a normal symphony orchestra.”

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Kawachi, professor of music at Senzoku Gakuen University and lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts, continues to lead the orchestra.

Both programs at Irvine Barclay Theatre include the overture to Mozart’s “Le nozze di Figaro” (The Marriage of Figaro); Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, with soloist Ko Iwasaki, professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor.

All proceeds from the opening concerts, sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and the three Toshiba America Companies of Southern California, benefit “Tix for Teens,” a program designed to integrate Orange County high-school students into the concert-going experience free of charge.

The orchestra is donating its services for the Tennessee concert as part of that state’s bicentennial celebration; tickets are free. The Carnegie Hall event benefits New York’s All-City High School Music Program with a minimum gift of $100,000.

The unusual tour routing coincides with Toshiba’s plants in the United States. Southern California is home to 2,000 Toshiba employees; a television factory near Nashville employs 2,000. Toshiba America Inc. headquarters in Manhattan has a roster of about 100, however, and Toshiba Consumer Products in New Jersey 500. But that didn’t deter the TPO. “Our orchestra wants to play especially in Carnegie Hall,” Kashiwagi noted.

Orchestra members dipped into their own pockets and came up with enough money to cover more than half the tour costs. The company pays for the rest.

Even on the home front, while Toshiba Corp. pays for music scores and concert-hall fees, other expenses not covered by subsidies and ticket proceeds are funded by contributions from the musicians themselves. Each member pays an annual $200 fee.

“We pick up the money at bonus time, as soon as possible!” Kashiwagi said.

The group released a CD in 1992 on the Live Notes label entitled, simply, “The 4th Regular Concert.” The ensemble played its ninth regular concert in January.

The Toshiba band is the buzz of the industry. Japanese companies including Sony, Hitachi and Mitsubishi are following suit, though generally on a smaller scale.

According to Kashiwagi, he’s been approached for advice on several occasions, but he jealously guards his blueprint for corporate orchestral success:

“That is secret,” he said. “Make [one] by yourself. Same as technology!”

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The Irvine concerts are sold out. The good news is that Monday’s event will be cybercast live on the Internet from Toshiba’s home page at https://www.toshiba.com (The transmission is made technically possible in part by Corona del Mar’s Internet Exchange International Inc.)

The idea, of course, is to reach as many people as possible, and to do so in a way that won’t simply be, well, businesslike.

“When we thought of the name of our orchestra, we decided it should be the ‘philharmonic,’ which means love of harmony, just as ‘philosophy’ is love of wisdom,” Kashiwagi said. “ ‘Harmony’ means not only harmony of tones but harmony of the heart. Through music, it is not only Toshiba people who harmonize by our orchestra.”

* The Toshiba Philharmonic Orchestra performs works by Mozart, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky on Monday and Tuesday at Irvine Barclay Theatre, Campus Drive and Bridge Road. 8 p.m. SOLD OUT. (714) 553-2422.