Japanese Orchestral Favourites

Toyama, Konoye, Ifukube, Akutagawa, Koyama, Yoshimatsu

THIS collection features six orchestral works which are favourites of the Japanese.

And, in my view, they represent a truly ear-opening collection of fascinating music which combines traditional orchestral instruments and forms with distinctive Japanese percussion and the sushi of Eastern music - the pentatonic scale.

As the sleeve notes will tell you, European music was banned from Japan from the second half of the 16th Century, and was only accepted again in the second half of the 19th Century.

Despite this huge gap of combining cultures, Japanese composers obviously embraced the European form in full force with a substantial repertoire of East meets West orchestral works which began to appear regularly in the concert world from the later 1930s onwards.

This collection of favourites represents a diverse collection of styles and flavours, all of which owe much to early 20th Century European composers, but each bears an unmistakable cultural voice of Japan.

The first piece featured on this stunning CD - Rhapsody for Orchestra - by Yuzo Toyama, was written in 1960 and shows great influence from Bartok and Shostakovich, who places importance on folk melodies.

Rhapsody begins with repeated sounds from the hyoshigi, Japanese wooden blocks, which instantly sets the scene for the melodies composed around well-known Japanese folk songs. Toyama displays mastery and precision of the form and development of a Western format using a distinctly Japanese voice to tell the tale.

The second work by composer Hidemaro Konoye is entitled Etenraku. It is an arrangement of a gagaku piece which bears the same title - the traditional music of the Japanese Imperial court.

There is a distinct similarity in his style to Debussy, but whenever this was raised with the composer he claimed Debussy was influenced by gagaku which he had heard at the Paris International Exposition of 1889.

All eight pieces featured on this CD were written between 1931 and 1980. The most contemporary and final offering, from Takashi Yoshimatsu, displays the composer's allegiance to the neo-romantic school with distinct reference to the styles of Ravel and Stravinsky, which helps define this collection as distinctly non-European.