Japanese Orchestral Favourites: music by Toyama, Kononye, Ifukube, Akutagawa, etc

"From what I've read, this is the first volume in a new series from Naxos. And if the rest is as good as this one, it'll be first class all the way."
- Gilbert French, American Record Guide, September/October 2002

"The performances are superb - poetic where poetry is needed and lusty when required - and the Naxos engineering is top-of-the-line. This CD is an excellent antidote to overly familiar music and excessively touted 'superstars'."
- Raymond Tuttle, Classical Net July 2002

"The orchestra is an excellent one, with much characterful solo playing, and the recording does it full justice."
- Michael Oliver, Gramophone July 2002

In the second half of the sixteenth century Japan, for a time, accepted European music, but this acceptance was cut short by the policy that rejected all European influences. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the door was opened again to Europe and that European music once more found a place. In 1921 the first Japanese work for a European-style orchestra was composed, the Overture by Kôsçak Yamada, who had studied in Berlin. Thereafter the number of orchestral works by Japanese composers increased steadily, so that, from the later 1930s until today, there are annually some thirty such compositions, mounting sometimes to as many as a hundred. The present collection includes six of those best known in Japan, with four of them based on the traditional Japanese pentatonic scale.