Yashiro: Piano Concerto / Symphony

Description

Akio Yashiro (1929-1976) Piano Concerto • Symphony"Turning their backs on the future, they invariably looked to the past for models. Yet, never content with past models, they endeavoured to put them in order and to unify them from the present-day viewpoint, with the result that their efforts crystalized into a number of works, thoroughly refined, flawless and, to an unequalled degree of perfection", wrote Akio Yashiro in paying tribute to Glazunov and Dukas. What he wrote, however, is to a certain extent, true of Yashiro himself. He was unmistakably a composer who, highly sceptical of the tendency of composers after the Second World War to look to the future in avant-garde experimentation, sought to learn more from the past. It may safely be assumed that what he did accept was the style of the immediate post-war period, up to Messiaen. His position was simply reflected in an episode in 1962, when John Cage visited Japan, and he kept on heckling Cage’s ‘performance’, saying "This is no music". Akio Yashiro was born in Tokyo on 10th September, 1929. His father Yukio Yashiro was a leading historian of European fine arts in Japan. He had studied in Italy in the 1920s, and his work on Botticelli had won high esteem, even among European scholars. His mother was a pianist. Brought up in the artistic environment provided by his parents, Yashiro began his piano lessons at the age of five, and, soon turning to composition, became a pupil of Saburo Moroi when he was ten. Moroi had studied in Berlin, and was composing works of absolute music in the form of symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and similar established forms. A great admirer of Beethoven, Moroi believed that the organic and strict development of a motif was all in all in music. From 1943 on Yashiro studied under Qunihico Hashimoto. The modernist Hashimoto introduced his young pupil to Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. On the other hand, at Gyosei High School, run by French Catholic monks, where Yashiro had his secondary education, he was trained in the French language. In April, 1945, towards the end of World War II, Yashiro entered the Tokyo music school, the present Faculty of Music, the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and continued to study under Hashimoto. Under the same teacher was Toshiro Mayuzumi, who was later to become the champion of avant-garde music in Japan. Yashiro also joined the Kamakura Symphony Orchestra that Hashimoto conducted, and played the timpani. In 1946, after Hashimoto had resigned from the Academy as a result of his war-time activities, he and Mayuzumi studied under Tomojiro Ikenouchi and Akira Ifukube, who replaced Hashimoto. Ikenouchi, who had studied under Busser in Paris and respected Ravel, taught his pupils to compose thoroughly polished music with perfect finish, while Ifukube, a pupil of Alexander Tcherepnin, who had particular attachment to ostinato and refrain, taught them precise and powerful orchestration using Strav