Toshio Hosokawa: Landscapes

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.