Toshio Hosokawa: Landscapes

Münchener Kammerorchester, Alexander Liebreich

Toshio Hosokawa: Landscapes
Release date: 23.09.2011 ECM 2095
CD18,90 €add to cart
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We last heard from Mayumi Miyata on Helmut Lachenmann’s  “Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern“, where the sound of the shō,  one of the oldest wind instruments,  symbolized other planes of existence: it seems to carry with it the feeling of other times and places. This has made it paradoxically attractive to contemporary composers. John Cage wrote some of his final music for the shō, and it was perhaps inevitable that Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa would give it special consideration.   In this fascinating collaboration with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Mayumi Miyata solos in Hosakawa’s music for strings and shō, and plays unaccompanied shō on “Sakura”, Hosakawa’s adapation of a traditional Japanese piece. The album concludes with “Cloud and Light”, a 22-minute piece from 2008, where orchestra and shō drift weightlessly in resonant space.

Featured Artists
  • Münchener Kammerorchester
  • Alexander LiebreichConductor
  • Mayumi MiyataShô
Recorded

October 2009, Himmelfahrtskirche Sendling, Munich

Original Release Date

23.09.2011

Toshio Hosokawa’s work involves dialogues between East and West, and ancient and modern – here represented in the form of the Japanese bamboo mouth organ, the shô, and the orchestra, respectively. Played by Mayumi Miyata, the shô has a gentle, evanescent character whose glistening, high-register drone is emulated in pieces such as “Landscape V” and “Cloud and Light” by the strings of the Münchener Kammerorchester; in the latter wordk, the addition of restrained metallic percussion and brass provides island of rootedness among the airy languor, whose wightless, immutable presence recalls the drift-music of such as Morton Feldman and Pauline Oliveiros. Exquisite.
Andy Gill, The Independent
 
“Clouds and Lights” (2008), a brief thunderous section apart, summons peaceful, meditative images. “Landscape V” (1993) is a delicate dialogue, the liner notes suggest between sky and lake or between two strangers who exchange no words: “Sakura für Otto Tomek” (2008), for shô, evokes clouds of cherry blossom and “Ceremonial Dance” (2000), for string orchestra, suggests the hypnotically slow movements of gagaku.
Stephen Pettitt, Sunday Times
 
Man muss dem Münchener Kammerorchester größte Komplimente machen, was die nuancierte Darstellung von Hosokawas diffizil fluktuierender Farbigkeit betrifft! Mayumi Miyata schließlich, die wohl meistgebuchte Meisterin des Instrumentes, darf ihre ganze Differenzierungskunst in "Sakura für Otto Tomek" (2008) zeigen, "Choral-Bearbeitung" eines japanischen Frühlingsliedes in wunderschönen Farben.
Dirk Wieschollek, FonoForum
 
Hosokawa explores how an orchestral string section can complement to the esoteric shô. His solution is to write string music that breathes with the shô. Chords, often of inscrutably complex construction, emerge from nothing and then swell into the foreground, before receding back to silence. The sensitivity of this approach is laudable.
Gavin Dixon, Classical CD Review
 
Kaum einer versteht für die japanische Mundorgel Sho so idiomatisch zu komponieren wie Toshio Hosokawa. Das Prinzip des aus dem Nichts entstehenden, sphärenhaften Klangs überträgt er bruchlos auch auf das Streichorchester. In "Landscapes V" und "Cloud and Light" verschmilzt das Soloinstrument vollkommen mit dem Orchester, die biegsamen Klangflächen bringt das Münchener Kammerorchester unter Alexander Liebreich sensibel und ausdrucksstark zur Entfaltung. Neben den Orchesterwerken zeicht die Sho-Spielerin Mayumi Miyata ihr hohes Können auch in einem zauberhaften Instrumentalsolo. Entrückung ist unausweichlich.
Neue Musikzeitung
 
Un atome de sho, accord au déploiment microscopique, suffit à engendrer une partition de vastes proportions qui s´apparente tantot à un rituel. Associé à la référence contemporaine du sho (Mayumi Miyata), l´Orchestre de chambre de Munich, dirigé per Alexander Liebreich, restitue avec intensité le parcours orageux de pièces toujours ouvertes et refermées dans le registre extatique.
Sylvain Siclier & Pierre Gervasoni, Le Monde
 
His compositions became fusions  of archaic and modern, ceremonial music and concert music, East and West, and his growing interest in Zen Buddhism – with its symbolic interpretation of nature – led him to study the sho, Japan’s ancient mouth organ with its 17 bamboo pipes, which is now most often heard in Imperial gagaku. This is the instrument that caresses the ear in the opening piece, not so much as a sonic mist, ever so delicate as its pure tones slowly multiply. When the strings of the orchestra join in, the effect is gently intensified. As Paul Griffith points out in his liner note, even the orchestral brass can join in this evocation of drifting clouds, while the percussion adds its own twinkling brightness , thanks to the Japanese wind-bells. We’ve heard a lot about fusion over the past decade or so, and most of it has mercifully evaporated on the wind. It has been all too easy to put groups from disparate traditions together, slap the label ‘fusion’ on the results, and await acclaim for cultural bridge-building.But musical bridge-building needs to be slow, organic, and impelled by something deeper than a catchy headline. Hosokawa, Miyata, and their German colleagues have chosen a quieter route but their collaborations genuinely point towards a possible musical future.
Michael Church, The Scotsman

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