A high-grade transfer to LP for a 2018 album of popular songs in delightful transcriptions by Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), and played by an Italian guitarist who has made a speciality of this repertoire. 'My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared to walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern, and texture.' Widely considered to be the greatest composer in the classical music tradition in modern Japan, Toru Takemitsu merged Japanese and Western instruments and techniques to create a unique sound world. During the post-war years, in his youth, Takemitsu came into contact with Western music through radio broadcasts the American occupying forces - not only jazz, but especially classical music by Debussy and Schoenberg. 'Every afternoon they broadcast three hours, of beautiful classical music - Bruno Walter, Toscanini, or Paul Whiteman from the Hollywood Bowl. I listened to radio every day. My first teacher was the radio.' Takemitsu found a meeting place between pop and classical music in his scores for almost a hundred Japanese films such as Kurosawa's acclaimed Ran. The guitar also took a starring role in several of in concert works, such as the concerto To the Edge of Dream, and solo pieces such as Towards the Sea. But these transcriptions belong to a lighter genre, and make an affectionate homage to songwriters from George and Ira Gershwin to Lennon and McCartney. Londonderry Air, Over the Rainbow and The Internationale will not be found together on very many song albums, but Takemitsu's taste was as broad as his sensibility was refined. Amours perdues is a classic example of the postwar French chanson, by Joseph Kosma, while What a Friend (we have in Jesus) is a revivalist hymn from 1850s America. Andrea Dieci has recorded Takemitsu's 'own' concert music for the guitar more than once, lending his performance of these transcriptions a particular authority.

Classical Music

Although the composer once admitted that he took the title for Rain Tree Sketch from a can of shaving foam, the piece and several others in this invaluable collection share a watery theme which links them back to the music of Debussy as well as the more obvious influence of Messiaen. This collection of Takemitsu's piano music is filled with a quizzical air and often touches of oblique humor, as though someone is smiling, somewhere. With warm, softly resounding chords and pitter-pattering melodic motifs above, Takemitsu's piano so often evokes rain gently falling on earth and leaves. There are bright, brisk flashes of light as well as a pervasive undertone of melancholy, which in a work such as Les Yeux Clos can be accounted for by the work's nature as a memorial to a friend. The poetic title of For Away is matched by the distant reverie of it's notes: 'my expression of extolment,' according to the composer, 'and an offering to the Galaxy of Life - a galaxy that is not the sole domain of mankind.' This is among the most harmonically spare and experimental works on the album, whereas Litany draws inspiration from Eastern modes as well as their reinterpretation at the hands of Debussy and Messiaen. Perhaps the boldest piece Takemitsu wrote for piano is Piano Distance, which is notated without a clear metre in the hyper-distilled style of Webern. Born in 1987, the Belgian pianist Lukas Huisman has made a speciality of new music, studying with the likes of Ian Pace and Geoffrey Douglas Madge. Through these and other teachers he has immersed himself in the complex worlds of Brian Ferneyhough and Kaiksohru Sorabji, among others, requiring a phenomenal technique as well as an appetite for the unfamiliar and challenging.

Classical Music

Classical Music

REVIEWS:
The Wire (p.71) - "[P]owerfully expressionistic....A FLOCK is widely considered as Takemitsu's breakthrough piece..."

Now regarded as one of the most important composers of the second half of the twentieth century, Toru Takemitsu was the first Japanese composer to gain international status.

Classical Music

The first Japanese composer to achieve international status, Toru Takemitsu proposed a fusion between Western music and the culture of his country. His music radiates a lyrical intensity that comes as much from his roots in the early modernists Debussy and Alban Berg as from his affinity with the more overtly experimental mid-twentieth-century styles of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Played throughout the world, he is considered one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century. Of the four works gathered here, three feature the guitar. Inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson, Spectral Canticle takes the listener through elusive sonic transformations corresponding to the changing seasons evoked by the poem. To the Edge of Dream has an eerie mood and celebrates the haunting, often sinister paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux. Also inspired by a work of art, Vers, l’arc-en-ciel, Palma, with its refined writing, is close to the spectral composers. Finally, Twill by Twilight for orchestra expresses the moment, just after sunset, when twilight turns into darkness in a delicate and uncluttered pointillism.

REVIEWS:

Clearly all the soloists were prepared for this challenging music-making, as was the BBC Philharmonic. With informative liner notes, one comes away from this recording with an excellent sense of Takemitsu’s writing for guitar and orchestra.

-- American Record Guide

Exceptional accounts here of four of the Japanese composer’s works, with soloists and orchestra alive to the extraordinary coexistence of stillness and threat in Takemitsu’s writing. Startlingly vivid, his sound pictures capture the changing of light, seasons, emotions and memories with unblinking clarity.

-- The Sunday Times (UK)

Selections recorded at the Toronto Centre for the Arts in June, 2001 and St. John Chrysostom Church, Newmarket in August, 2001.

TAKEMITSU Romance. Lento in due movimenti. Uninterupted Rest. Piano Distance. For Away. Les yeus clos. Les yeux clos II. Rain Tree Sketch. Rain Tree Sketch II. Piano Pieces for Children. Litany • Kotaro Fukuma (pn) • NAXOS 8.570261 (63:57)


Kotaro Fukuma (b. 1982) received high praise from Susan Kagan in Fanfare 29:2 for a program of Robert Schumann’s works; she called his technique “dazzling” and opined that his version of the Fantasiestücke “leaves nothing to be desired.” The piano music of Toru Takemitsu would seem to require a total reconsideration of touch and temperament, but Fukuma rises to the challenge. He’s certainly capable of phrasing with delicacy, as the opening of Les yeux clos II reveals, with the addition of a biting modernity to the gestures of Piano Distance and a sharp, pointed attack in Uninterrupted Rest . Even so, he continually highlights the lyrical nature of the music, not by emphasizing its flowing qualities, as does Kumi Ogano (Philips—see Fanfare 16:3), or its contemplative breadth, per Roger Woodward (Etcetera), but through a thoughtful balance of dramatic detail and atmospheric resonance. And though his Litany may lack the warmth and sensitivity of that of Peter Serkin (RCA—see Fanfare 20:3), it reinforces Takemitsu’s connection with Debussy.


Another advantage to this disc is its completeness—which is not to say it is complete. Fukuma omits realizations of Takemitsu’s two graphic scores, Corona and Crossing , as does everyone else except for Woodward, who’s recorded them twice (Etcetera and Explore). But Fukuma does include several previously overlooked or rejected pieces—a pair of charming, songlike, albeit ordinary miniatures for children; Lento in due movimenti , the unedited original version of Litany ; and, most interestingly, a Romance from 1949, the composer’s earliest surviving piano work, which combines Japanese modes, elements of Impressionism, and a brusque urgency unheard in his later music. Given the fact that both the Serkin and Woodward discs are not presently available, Fukuma deserves strong consideration for both the quality of his playing and the opportunity to hear these rare pieces.


FANFARE: Art Lange