Customer Reviews

Chamber Music by Toru Takemitsu

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This BIS disc brings together six pieces by Toru Takemitsu for piano and/or strings. They are performed by the Ensemble Kai of Japan, comprising Hideki Nagano on piano, Ethica Ogawa on first violin, Takeshi Takezawa on second violin, Hiroto Tobisawa on viola and Atsushi Sakai on cello. The pieces represent over 40 years of Takemitsu's career, but they share his typical stylistic features of slow tempos and a lack of obvious drama.

The earliest item on the disc is "Distance de fee" for violin and piano (1951). One of the composer's first acknowledged works, it has an obvious debt to the early (pre-birdsong) Messiaen, whom Takemitsu then considered the leading modernist. But far from being juvenalia, this is actually one of the more memorable pieces on the disc. Another decade on, "Landscape I" for string quartet (1961) shows Takemitsu taking inspiration from his own Japanese culture, with which he was gradually reconciled over the course of the 1960s. Here silence is as important as the sounds, sometimes unusually brutal for Takemitsu.

"Hika | Elegy" for violin and piano (1966) lives up to its title with its mournful tones. Of all the words here, this one may be the least virtuosic, with its straightforward violin line and spare piano accompaniment. While the sound quality here is better, I prefer the warmer performance by Ida Kavafian and Peter Serkin on a DG reissue.

In the late 1970s Takemitsu's music, which never offered too much in the way of variety, settled into a late style which the composer termed the "sea of tonality" for its reliance on the S-E-A (E flat-E-A) motif. "A Way a Lone" for string quartet (1980) features this motif in its little musical gardens, collections of vaguely tonal gestures that are individually lovely but isolated from what precedes and what follows. One hears the very same soundworld in "Between Tides" for violin, cello and piano (1993).

Howver, "Rocking Mirror Daybreak" for violin duo (1983) took me by surprise. Though composed in that "sea of tonality" period at the very moment Takemitsu was writing his most same-y, this four-movement piece inspired by Zen poetry sounds like nothing else in the composer's late oeuvre. So much of it is played as harmonics, which give the piece an icy and otherworldly sound.

I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to Takemitsu's work. I think his best pieces are orchestral ones, such as "Gemeaux" and "November Steps" (available in the EU in a budget-priced Brilliant Classics box). But I don't think many people who don't know his music would stumble upon this listing. If you're a Takemitsu fan, you will want to eventually check out this CD that has the only easily available recordings of certain work.

its a nice song i'm very interest with the song and also toru takemits