A String Around Autumn / I Hear the Water Dreaming / Riverrun

"Beautiful performances of bewitching Takemitsu pieces - an ideal introduction. Toru Takemitsu, who died in 1996, was one of the few composers who bridged with great success the very different worlds of Western and traditional Japanese music. A distinguished composer of music for films - something he was always very proud of and which inspired him to explore extraordinary new sound worlds - Takemitsu was fascinated by landscape. The works on this beautifully performed disc take a number of very different approaches to portraying the visual in the aural."
(Gramophone)

With an exciting programme of four works from the 1980's, this disc offers further insights into the music of Toru Takemitsu. Three concertos - for viola, flute and piano respectively - and one piece for string orchestra show the composer as a brilliant orchestrator with an unfailing sense of the understated. But first and foremost these recordings reinforce the image of Takemitsu as a communicator. In spite of their evocative and poetic titles - A String Around Autumn, I Hear the Water Dreaming - and the literary sources of inspiration - A Way a Lone and riverrun are both quotations from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake - these works aren't "stories" as such. However, Takemitsu is a master of creating atmospheric moods that somehow enable the listener to "see" for example a landscape in autumn. Tadaaki Otaka has proved himself a congenial interpreter of Takemitsu's music - most recently on BIS-CD-1078 - as has Noriko Ogawa, whose recording of the complete music for solo piano, BIS-CD-805, has won well-deserved praise. The other soloists, Philip Dukes (viola) and Sharon Bezaly (flute), are well known as two of the brightest stars in the younger generation of musicians.