Takemitsu: Orchestral Works

Description

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) Spirit Garden Solitude Sonore Three Film Scores Dreamtime A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden   Toru Takemitsu was the first Japanese composer to gain international status, creating in his compositions a remarkable fusion between Western music and the philosophies, sensibilities and culture of his country, as well as, on occasions, its music. During his lifetime his music was performed around the world; posthumously he is regarded as one of the most important composers of the second half of the twentieth century. The works on this CD cover Takemitsu's career from the early Solitude Sonore to Spirit Garden composed two years before his death. Largely self taught, Takemitsu's starting points were Debussy, Stravinsky, Berg and Messiaen; he was also influenced by the post-World War II avant-garde such as Boulez, and by his friends John Cage and Morton Feldman. He first came to prominence with Requiem for strings (1957), which Stravinsky hailed as a masterwork. The musical traditions of his country became important in the 1960s with compositions such as November Steps (1967), a concerto-like work for the Japanese instruments, the biwa and shakuhachi and orchestra, and he also wrote for Japanese instruments alone, for instance In an Autumn Garden (1973) for gagaku orchestra. In his later years his music became more tonal as his affinities turned again to the early twentieth-century French composers who had inspired him in his youth. Takemitsu had a wonderful ear for orchestral colour. His scores, frequently cast in a single span, are refined, sensuous and harmonically rich, yet at the same time delicate with many pauses for silence, sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy, but all closely calculated to create the contemplative, dream-like spaciousness and stillness that characterises his art. He said of himself that he probably belonged to a type of composer for whom melody was a crucial aspect to his music: 'I am old fashioned', he wrote, 'What I desire to reach through the communication of melody is beyond the pleasure and sorrow experienced during this continuation. Yet I cannot simply call that for which I reach eternity.' His inspiration came from many different sources as far apart as Australian aboriginal myths to images from film and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The natural world was especially important to him, for example, he was fascinated by different aspects of water as in riverrun (1984), Rain Coming (1982) and Vers, l'arc-en-ciel, Palma (1984). In Tree Line (1988) the inspiration came from a row of acacia trees near his mountain home, and images from dreams led to one of his finest orchestral works, A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977). As a man he was a polymath who loved cinema, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Western pop music and wrote a detective novel. Takemitsu was fond of using the metaphor of walking around a Japanese formal garden for the process of listening to his