Customer Reviews

Toru Takemitsu: Quotation of Dream (20/21 series) - London Sinfonietta / Oliver Knussen

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are hyper-active and respond only to marching bands then this is emphatically not for you. I'm mystified, having heard this CD half a dozen times why the lush, semi-static sound world common to all of these pieces doesn't cloy, but it doesn't. Not only do they indeed have variety, helped by an amazing ear for orchestral colour and nuance, but the atmosphere engendered is so strong it invites careful listening: one is drawn in to discover ever more subtle changes: textural, thematic, and more rarely, rhythmic. Dissonance is mentioned in the Amazon review; one's perception of dissonance changes here with such a cushioned sound-world, ones ear is tickled by such aural spice, never battered by it. Takemitsu's language, while his own, is deeply eclectic - from the conscious quotes from Debussy's 'La Mer' in 'Quotation of Dream', to extensive echoes of Messiaen, Scriabin and occasionally Ravel. Performances are exemplary and the recording quality classic - the perspectives even cope with the spatially designed ensemble piece 'Archipelago S' with antiphonal ensembles divided by brass and two solo clarinets behind the audience. And I've never heard such beautiful brass pieces in my life , two 'Signals from Heaven' that act as bookends to this compelling anthology. This is powerfully atmospheric, immediate music that will haunt you. Bravos all round.

These pieces from Takemitsu's maturity represent the pinnacle of achievement for this gifted composer. Without regard to trends and fashion in contemporary music has has created his own sound universe. A peaceful, yet oddly non-somnolent, serenity informs virtually every bar of these wonderful pieces. The music is beautiful, lush and imaginative at every turn and despite strong ties to the French impressionists it is creative and unique and infused with Takemitsu's personal stamp and his nature-mystical aesthetic. The sound and the performances are first rate and Oliver Knussen must be congratulated on doing such a fine job in bringing these excellent pieces to life. If you love Takemitsu, you will love this CD. If you are new to Takemitsu, this is a wonderful introduction to one of the 20th century's finest composers.
Recommended without reservation.

Toru Takemitsu was one of the late 20th century's most individual composers whose scores use primarily the traditional instruments of western classical music. Perhaps in part because he wrote film scores in addition to concert pieces, his art is highly communicative and un-academic. It has the double merit of being about as far as you can get both from gnarly, dissonant modernism and from pretty-pretty New Age ear candy.

Quotation of Dream includes seven pieces from the last decade of Takemitsu's life (he died in 1996), including the premiere recording of the title piece. The disc begins and ends with fanfares that, while perhaps effective as aural bookends, are to my ears undistinguished. The music that lies in between, however, is extraordinarily compelling.

Takemitsu's style in these works is generally meditative, with frequent slow, quiet passages, strings predominating. But there are dramatic incidents and color as well: flaring brass, rising like a mountainous island from a tropical sea; raindrops of chimes; drawn-out woodwind lines weaving sinuously through swirls of massed violins. The music sometimes pivots around silent pauses, like the empty spaces in Zen painting. In Quotation of Dream, twin pianos (played by Paul Crossley and Peter Serkin, respectively) dominate the foreground with gentle cascades of notes while orchestral clouds form in the background.

The musical language is often reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel; in mood (though not in technique) it can resemble the slowest and most mysterious moments in music of the second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern et al.). The subtlety and elusiveness probably owe something to the composer's Japanese heritage. But this is no cut-and-paste job; the overall impression is startlingly original.

I have not read the liner notes, and have no idea of what Takemitsu is trying to "say," or what these scores "mean." I would also suggest that those considerations are pretty irrelevant: the important thing is the sound world that he has created, which is both other-worldly and bracing.

Oliver Knussen, a contemporary British composer and a friend of Takemitsu, conducted the London Sinfonietta in these recordings. It is apparent that that he helped the players, who sound expert, get "inside" the music.

Anyone who already knows and appreciates Takemitsu's sensibility need not hesitate to acquire this disc. It can also be recommended for all but the most determinedly "mostly Mozart" classical devotees.

The presentation is not ideal. Deutsche Grammophon has never excelled at digital recordings, and the sound of this disc, while detailed and transparent, is a bit bright and clinical. The disc is contained in one of those cardboard containers that some labels are now trying to get you to accept in lieu of the standard jewel case because it's cheaper to produce (but not cheaper for you to buy). The atmospheric sepia-toned photo on the cover has a fat round sticker on it that shouts "World Premiere Recording"; if you try to peel off the sticker, it leaves ineradicable shreds. The plastic tray with the central claw ring is glued to the cardboard. Take care not to break the plastic, because there is no way you can replace it.

QUOTATION OF DREAM is the first of Deutsche Grammophon's several collections of pieces by late Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who thankfully has been getting ever-more attention since his untimely death in 1996. Takemitsu was a mainly self-taught composer, and because of this there seems to be little that connects him to his serialism- or minimalism-inspired colleagues. Nevertheless, Takemitsu's own path is fascinating, exploring Japanese and Western compositional principles in isolation and in combination and striving to transcend them both. These pieces, several of them related by shared thematic materials. are lovingly performed by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen, who was a friend and admirer of Takemitsu.

The disc is framed by two antiphonal fanfares written in 1987, "Day Signal" and "Night Signal", together called "Signals from Heaven". They are closely related, both using dissonance to suggest the changing of the skies, but with one inverted from the other to suggest an opposite tone.

A quip of Takemitsu was "I am self-taught, but I consider Debussy my teacher." The first major work here, "Quotation of Dream - Say sea, take me!" (1991), is a tribute to Debussy using quotations from his "La Mer" as if the composer was trying to recreate the piece he had just woken up from dreaming. The title also refers to its use of some material from "Dream/Window", an earlier composition present on this disc. "Quotation of Dream" is a lovely tribute to the composer's greatest inspiration, but the majority of the work comes only from Takemitsu. His use of a zig-zag of harmony, of orchestral colour that comes forth and recedes like waves is nothing you have ever heard before in orchestral music.

"How Slow the Wind" (1991), inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson, is rather more brooding. It's most interesting moments occur toward the end, when cascading woodwind sounds and the faintly mechanical notes of two Swiss cowbells transform the work into something different. This is one of Takemitsu's most impressive works,

"Twill by Twillight (in memory of Morton Feldman)" (1988) is an experiment with a musical "tapestry", where a theme "weaves" through the piece. The piece is pretty music, but does little to make itself memorable and for me remains the low point of this collection.

The title of "Archipelago S." for twenty-one players (1993) refers to the landscapes of Seattle, Stockholm, and the islands of the Sato Inland Sea . The piece has an innovative stage layout, with the players grouped into five "islands": a five-person brass group, two mixed seven-piece groups, a clarinet sitting to the right, and a clarinet sitting to the left. The effect is indeed somewhat nautical and this recording exploits the space well.

"Dream/Window" (1985) is probably the most important composition on this disc. Every note of this piece is of the greatest delicacy, and the work as a whole is so crystalline and fragile that one feels one will break it just by listening to it. Though Takemitsu's later works are impressive, they have never seemed to me to acheive the perfection of "Dream/Window". What is surprising is that this work is true twelve-tone music, yet with Takemitsu's skill it does not sound dull or scientific.

If you ever think that modern-classical music is written only by dispassionate ivory-tower robots like Pierre Boulez, the works of Takemitsu will show you that contemporary techniques can, under the right hands, touch the emotions as much as the intellect. While it takes some time to get used to (nearly six months for me), this is probably the single best introduction to the music of Toru Takemitsu. And one should certainly listen to this before getting the other DG "20/21" discs, which are rather more specialised (with, for example, one having traditional Japanese pieces and the other flute and guitar works).

(Verified purchase from a local record store.)

Toru Takemitsu was one of the late 20th century's most individual composers whose scores use primarily the traditional instruments of western classical music. Perhaps in part because he wrote film scores in addition to concert pieces, his art is highly communicative and un-academic. It has the double merit of being about as far as you can get both from gnarly, dissonant modernism and from pretty-pretty New Age ear candy.

Quotation of Dream includes seven pieces from the last decade of Takemitsu's life (he died in 1996), including the premiere recording of the title piece. The disc begins and ends with fanfares that, while perhaps effective as aural bookends, are to my ears undistinguished. The music that lies in between, however, is extraordinarily compelling.

Takemitsu's style in these works is generally meditative, with frequent slow, quiet passages, strings predominating. But there are dramatic incidents and color as well: flaring brass, rising like a mountainous island from a tropical sea; raindrops of chimes; drawn-out woodwind lines weaving sinuously through swirls of massed violins. The music sometimes pivots around silent pauses, like the empty spaces in Zen painting. In Quotation of Dream, twin pianos (played by Paul Crossley and Peter Serkin, respectively) dominate the foreground with gentle cascades of notes while orchestral clouds form in the background.

The musical language is often reminiscent of Debussy and Ravel; in mood (though not in technique) it can resemble the slowest and most mysterious moments in music of the second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern et al.). The subtlety and elusiveness probably owe something to the composer's Japanese heritage. But this is no cut-and-paste job; the overall impression is startlingly original.

I have not read the liner notes, and have no idea of what Takemitsu is trying to "say," or what these scores "mean." I would also suggest that those considerations are pretty irrelevant: the important thing is the sound world that he has created, which is both other-worldly and bracing.

Oliver Knussen, a contemporary British composer and a friend of Takemitsu, conducted the London Sinfonietta in these recordings. It is apparent that that he helped the players, who sound expert, get "inside" the music.

Anyone who already knows and appreciates Takemitsu's sensibility need not hesitate to acquire this disc. It can also be recommended for all but the most determinedly "mostly Mozart" classical devotees.

The presentation is not ideal. Deutsche Grammophon has never excelled at digital recordings, and the sound of this disc, while detailed and transparent, is a bit bright and clinical. The disc is contained in one of those cardboard containers that some labels are now trying to get you to accept in lieu of the standard jewel case because it's cheaper to produce (but not cheaper for you to buy). The atmospheric sepia-toned photo on the cover has a fat round sticker on it that shouts "World Premiere Recording"; if you try to peel off the sticker, it leaves ineradicable shreds. The plastic tray with the central claw ring is glued to the cardboard. Take care not to break the plastic, because there is no way you can replace it.

This disc offers well-played performances of all these compositions, but as with all of the recordings I have heard of Knussen recording Takemitsu's music, the results are a bit on the "clinical" side for my taste. They lack the rapturous element, the "dream" that Otaka, St. Clair, or Ozawa bring to Takemitsu.

And that leads to the paradox in this disc. Although Knussen's objective approach in his Takemitsu disc for Virgin, RIVERRUN and his recording of GREEN and ARC on the London Sinfonietta's label, lends the compositions a harder edge than heard in rival recordings, on the present disc (aside from the fine flanking fanfares) the conductor's way with this music has the paradoxical effect of making the music sound even more like a wallow in orchestral sonority than the more rapturous, more flexible approach adopted by the other conductors mentioned in this review. Oddly, the compositions tend to blend into each other in a way they do not in a disc like Otaka's HOW SLOW THE WIND on Bis, where I hear more of the ebb and flow of the music, each of the compositions has a more individualized profile, and the fragments of melody emerging from the orchestral mass have greater character and definition.

Knussen's objective way with this music bears the composer's imprimatur (as do different styles of conducting by other composers); but although the disc is undeniably beautiful from beginning to end, his approach to these compositions reveals less about the individual compositions than rival recorded performances. For a case in point, compare Otaka's eventful and colorful "Archipelago S" on Bis to Knussen's gentler, more generalized performance on DGG - the Otaka is no less beautiful than Knussen's, but there seems to be much more to the composition in his performance than there is in Knussen's, which to these ears merely sounds "pretty".

I also agree with the reviewer who dismissed the title composition - I would much rather hear any of the compositions from which it quotes (by both Debussy and Takemitsu) than this pretty but rather empty piece.

I have only recently begun listening to Takemitsu. Was introduced at a guitar recital. I have been slowly accumulating more of his compositions. For me, this is possibly the best.

Composition intrigues me perhaps more than any other aspect of music, and this fellow was clearly inspired. I would liken his music to that of Alan Hovhaness, but without some of the more brash moments of that composer. I can also hear the influence of Debussy, but Takemitsu takes the listener in many enjoyable directions throughout this CD.

The playing and recording are also top-notch.

All works on this disc were written between 1985 and 1993 and are thus examples of Takemitsu's later `Japanese garden' style with its strong influence by impressionism, Debussy in particular, utilizing what he termed the `sea of tonality'. But Takemitsu's style is in no way derivative; we are rather talking about a modernist, usually densely harmonic response to Debussy with music that is consistently dreamlike, slowly flowing and thoroughly captivating. Dream/Window is a case in point, with its slowly unfolding hypnotizing canvas where the pedal D is an anchor point for a recurring (in different rhythmic contexts and with different instruments) four-note gesture. Twill by Twilight is a tribute to Morton Feldman, and the composer describes the work fairly illustratively as follows: "The twill weave of the music takes effect by means of an extremely limited musical unit - or what we might better call the musical principle which exists prior to the forming of the melody or the taking shape of the rhythm. Subtle variations in pastel-like colors express the moment just after sunset, when twilight turns toward darkness."

Its gorgeous six-note melody makes How Slow the Wind perhaps the most immediately attractive work on this disc while the spatially conceived Archipelago S. might suffer something from regular stereo rather than surround sound. Quotation of Dream (`Say Sea, Take Me') is perhaps the work that showcases the Debussy inspiration the most, with conscious quotations from La Mer seamlessly integrated into the meditative landscape. The disc is framed, effectively, by the two shorter Signals from Heaven.

Despite its consistently meditative, slow-moving quality, the music here is actually quite variegated, but requires some concentration - listening through the disc in one go will probably be a little too much for most. The performances are scintillating, well-balanced and clear; the dazzling arrays of color are superbly realized, but never threatens to become overindulgently cloying. The recording sound is also absolutely marvelous. Now, there are alternative recordings of most of the music on this disc, which I have for the most part not heard, but I am pretty sure that you'll be hard pressed to come up with any better or equally good disc of late Takemitsu. Strongly recommended.