A more persuasive advocacy of Takemitsu's music cannot be imagined.

All four works on this disc offer Takemitsu in contemplative mood, with the most recent and most substantial, Fantasma/Cantos, a BBC commission first heard at the 1991 Cardiff Festival, the most persistently calm and controlled.

Quatrain II (1977), composed as a kind of pendant to Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps, totally avoids the more hectic and flamboyant aspects of Messiaen's musical character. Yet the textural refinement and expressive reticence personal to Takemitsu are allied to material of considerable substance and consequence, the tendency to dwell on sweeter sonorities offset by more steely gestures. In Waves (also 1977) this steeliness is even more apparent, for although the music is persistently slow, the use of horn, trombones and bass drum brings darker colours and a more dramatic atmosphere into play. This is a Takemitsu thoroughly in tune with the Western avant-garde of the day, but speaking with his own accent.

By contrast, Water-Ways (1978) seems balanced on a knife-edge between a mysterious, even slightly menacing atmosphere and the kind of romanticized response to nature that runs virtually unchallenged through the recent Fantasma/Cantos. Water-Ways just keeps this sentimental inclination at bay, whereas Fantasma/Cantos, despite a few more forceful initiatives in its later stages, seems lush to the point of indigestibility. Its rich tapestry is superbly laid out for soloist and orchestra, but I find less substance, and more hints of padding, than in the earlier works.

This carping tone cannot be extended to Richard Stoltzman's playing in Fantasma/Cantos: a more persuasive advocacy of Takemitsu's music cannot be imagined, and the support of Tadaaki Otaka and the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra is no less ideal. The Tashi recordings of the earlier pieces, made in 1978, come up well in these CD transfers.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone [1/1995]