Overture in D major / Symphony in F Major, 'Triumph and Peace'

"Performances here are masterful. In 'Overture in D,' Takuo Yuasa conducts the New Zealand Symphony; in the others he leads the Ulster Orchestra, of which he is the Music Director. Yamada is highly honored in his native land as indeed he should be; he was not only the first Japanese composer of Western music, he also helped start what became the country's leading orchestra in Japan, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, and helped to set up music education throughout the country. His life has even been dramatized for Japanese television. Here I must give credit to Morihide Katayama, the writer of the extremely informative booklet essay, for much of the above information about a composer I'd never encountered before. This is a worthwhile issue, particularly for those interested in following Naxos's continuing series of Music from Japan which is opening our ears to all-but-unknown music from that country."
-- Scott Morrison, Amazon.com, April 14, 2004

"The fine performers make out a case for them and for an under-explored area of musical engagement."
-- Jonathan Woolf, www.musicweb.uk.net

"Excellent performances..."
--Calum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine, 05/04

Kôsçak Yamada belongs to the group of the first fully-fledged composers that Japan produced. He was also a prominent conductor, organizer, and leader of the Japanese music world. As a great pioneer, he played a definitive rôle in helping Western music take root in Japan. In the 1860s, after 250 years of isolation, Japan restored extensive contacts with Western civilization, including music. Military bands were formed and in 1879 Ongaku-Torishirabe-Gakari, a national research centre of Western music (later to become the Tokyo Music School), was founded. Japanese traditional musicians under the Emperor started to learn Western music, and Japanese people were eager to make up for lost time in every field.

Yamada was born in these surroundings on 9th June 1886, the sixth of seven children. His father was formerly a samurai of lower grade in the Mikawa district (today's Aichi Prefecture), but the end of Japanese feudalism, with the collapse of the shogun regime, involved the disappearance of the samurai class. Yamada's father started his new life as a speculator in Tokyo, which brought him a large amount of money and a life of debauchery, but it did not last long, and soon after Kôsçak was born, the family moved to Yokosuka, where his father started a bookstore. In this naval city, as the Sino-Japanese War drew near, Yamada was enchanted by military bands marching around the city, and he tirelessly followed them. He also became familiar with hymns sung in church, as his mother's side of the family was devout Protestant and it is said that his family had a harmonium. Yamada's starting-point as a musician was these sounds of military bands, melodies of hymns, and the timbre and harmonies of the harmonium.

Yamada's life in Yokosuka was brief, as the family lost everything in a fire, returning to Tokyo when the boy was seven years old. In poverty, his brother left the family and his father died of cancer when Yamada was nine. Immediately after that, he was sent to a dormitory school (a night school with printing facilities), which was run by a clergyman in Sugamo, in the northern part of Tokyo. In this school he started a life of work, studies and hymns, dreaming of becoming a composer, but heavy work had a serious effect on his health, which forced him to spend two years in Kamakura, attended by his mother. After recovering from illness, he worked as an errand-boy in Shimbashi Station and when he was fourteen, he went to Okayama, in the West of Japan, where his thirteen-year-older sister lived. His sister had married an Englishman, Edward Gauntlet, who had come to Japan through his keen interest in the Orient and was teaching English at the Sixth High School of Okayama, one of the leading schools in Japan. This brother-in-law was from a well-connected family and was an amateur musician and an organist for the Anglican Church. Playing instruments and singing hymns with him, Yamada's dream of becoming a composer grew. His brother-in-law advised him to be a musician and helped him financially. His mother was at first against the idea of a samurai's child becoming a musician, but when Yamada was seventeen, she died, leaving a will that allowed him to follow this course. Thus in 1904 Yamada entered the Tokyo Music School, after studying at Kwansei Gakuin High School (a missionary school) and having experience in choral work and organ playing.

Although his desire was to become a composer, Yamada's major study at the Tokyo Music School was singing, as the school had no composition department until the 1930s. It seems that the Japanese government in those days only thought of training performers and educators in the field of Western music. Students who hoped to be composers were left to their own devices. While studying the cello and theory under the two German teachers at the school, August Junker, who was a pupil of Joachim, and Heinrich Werkmeister, who was from the Berlin Musikhochschule, Yamada continued to write string quartets, piano pieces, violin pieces, songs and choral works, when in 1910 Werkmeister recommended him to his private cello pupil Koyata Iwasaki, who was among the leaders of the Mitsubishi Foundation. Iwasaki promised to help him financially with his studies in Berlin. Yamada left for Berlin in high spirits and entered the Musikhochschule, Werkmeister's alma mater, in April 1910, studying there with Max Bruch and, among others, Karl Leopold Wolf.

Yamada's studies in Berlin were quite fruitful and significant. He absorbed everything he could in Berlin, while continuing to study academic harmony and counterpoint at school. During this Berlin period, he made a series of epoch-making achievements in Japanese music history. Yamada's predecessors had been attempting pieces for wind band, sonatas for solo instruments and piano-accompanied songs, but Yamada surpassed them in Germany, where he created orchestral pieces, a symphony, symphonic poems and a full-scale opera (including Heavenly Maiden fallen to Earth), all of which were the first-ever attempts of their kind by a Japanese composer. The present recording contains four pieces from this period.