After Songs of Solitude (BIS-2553), a project designed by Hiyoli Togawa at a time when Covid forced people across the world into isolation (released in March 2021), the Japanese-Australian violist now presents another themed album focusing on the situation of children. During the pandemic, she kept thinking of the many children who do not have a loving home and were forced to stay at home, and so were exposed helplessly to violence, hunger and poverty.

As with her previous disc, she commissioned works on the theme of childhood from composers around the world. Thirteen of them, from Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, answered the call and embarked on a journey into childhood. The result is a collection of lullabies, childhood memories and adventures. Playful, wild, silent, funny, serious or dreamy, these works are musical pleas for the rights of children around the world. Hiyoli Togawa combines them with the Allemandes from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for solo cello. Each of these Allemandes presents a new character, opening a very special dance universe. They invite us to surrender ourselves to the genuine and undisguised joy of playing and perhaps, almost, to lose ourselves in it – to find ourselves.

Songs of Solitude was conceived by the violist Hiyoli Togawa at a time when a virus was forcing people across the world into isolation and she herself needed to find a new rhythm of life as concert after concert was being cancelled. As she relates in the booklet to the disc, playing Bach – music that combines powerful emotions with a crystal-clear structure – became part of her daily routine, along with walks along the empty streets of Berlin. During these, the importance of remaining creative became even clearer to her, along with the idea to offer people the opportunity through music to reflect upon the difficulties of living through a pandemic. Having recently collaborated with the composer Kalevi Aho, she came upon the idea of asking him and a number of other composers to write for her – pieces that would ‘reflect life and work in the time of the coronavirus and that distil isolation in music’. The result is Songs of Solitude – works for solo viola commissioned from 11 different composers and interwoven with sarabandes from Bach’s cello suites. The individual pieces range from the meditative (Toshio Hosokawa reminiscing in his version of the traditional Sakura) to the defiant (Johanna Doderer’s Shadows). Some of them even provided Hiyoli with musical company – Aho’s Am Horizont requires her to play two parts on the viola while singing a third, and the piece by John Powell is written for nine voices, recorded in multitrack. The album was recorded in Berlin during three periods, June to October 2020, as the various pieces arrived and the restrictions in place at the time permitted.

The orchestral triptych of ‘Meditation, Nach dem Sturm’ and ‘Klage’ is award-winning composer Toshio Hosokawa’s response to the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and tsunami. Meditation mourns the victims with a quiet song of sorrow, Nach dem Sturm uses shamanic elements to suggest stormy darkness and the hope of light, while the healing Klage seeks to connect our world with the supernatural. ‘Autumn Wind’ unifies man and nature through the timeless sound of the shakuhachi. The collaboration between Naxos and composer Toshio Hosokawa has been very fruitful in recent years, and this new release follows on from two collections of orchestral works conducted by Jun Markl. Volme 1 of these “draws magically delicate colors and rich textural intricacies from what is a profoundly attractive score.” (Gramophone on Lotus under the moonlight), and volume 2 “reinforce Hosokawa’s commitment to poetic representations of human presences in the natural world.” (Gramophone). World-class vocal soloists in this recording include Danish soprano Susanne Elmark who has produced an aria recital for Naxos Denmark and mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura whose recordings include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as part of Christian Thielemenn’s Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra recordings on C Major. Tadashi Tajima is one of today’s most respected shakuhachi players, having performed around the world.

Toshio Hosokawa, Japan's pre-eminent living composer, creates his distinctive musical language from the fascinating relationship between western avant-garde art and traditional Japanese culture. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1945 poem, Hosokawa frames his monodrama The Raven as a Japanese Noh play, with its interaction between the human protagonist and an otherworldly animal. Vividly exploring ideas of madness, The Raven conjures up a shadowy and unfamiliar world.

Masako Ohta retreats into the silence of the Waldhaus Grandsberg in the Bavarian Forest to dedicate herself to Japanese masterpieces in deep concentration and solitude. The Munich-based pianist takes us on a musical journey through time and invites us to experience extraordinary compositions from four centuries from the land of the rising sun. Thanks to Japan's temporary isolation and special island position, cultural characteristics are preserved that are still present in contemporary music. Sound creations of great Japanese composers such as Kengyo Yatsuhashi from the 17th century, Kengyo Yoshizawa from the 19th century, Toru Takemitsu from the 20th century as well as Toshio Hosokawa and Fumio Yasuda from the present are telling us about springtime at the sea, the rain tree, the singing of birds and dances of distant islands.

Undisputedly brilliant in jazz and rock at all times, the percussion in all its diversity is proving more and more predestined for new music. Leonie Klein, a stirring artist in this field, offers here, partly in duo with Isao Nakamura, a compact, carefully compiled selection of today's music for percussion instruments. A solo version of Peter Eötvös's percussion concerto "Speaking Drums" is performed in true virtuoso style by the interpreter, with the voice of the percussionist joining the sounds of the drums. Vinko Globokar's "Dialog über Erde" experimentally exposes instruments to water, even in a small aquarium - a subtly elemental event. In Sara Glojnaric’s "Latitudes #2", the soloist on the drum set then enters into a breathtakingly virtuoso duel with artificial rhythm impulses from the tape. In Dai Fujikura's "Chattering Birds", the duo gives an astonishing demonstration of how much music is possible while radically reduced to finger cymbals. In Ursula Mamlok's "Variations and Interludes", again arranged for solo by Leonie Klein, the form emerges between the groups of instruments, and Hosokawa's "Windscapes" explores the contrast between vertical accent beats and horizontal sweeping and scratching sounds. And finally, Uroš Rojko's "Ritem kože", after many changes of perspective, constitutes the aesthetically homogeneous virtuoso conclusion to this album.