Toshio Hosokawa: Landscapes

Album review

Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, born in 1955, received most of his training in the West, studying with Isang Yun and Klaus Huber in Germany and at the Darmstadt Institute, and he brings a Japanese aesthetic sensibility to the techniques of modernism. Most of the music on this album is notable for its somber, atmospheric tone, a prevailing sense of virtual stasis, and its delicate, finely calibrated scoring. Three of the four pieces feature the shô, a wind instrument with multiple pipes that sounds like a miniature breath-powered organ, and that Hosokawa uses primarily to produce long-sustained, subtly shifting chords. Landscape V is scored for shô and strings. The shô's timbre blends so well with that of the strings that's its presence is sometimes almost imperceptible. The program notes describe the musical relationship of the soloists and the orchestra in these pieces with the analogy of "a still lake mirroring the sky," a visual image that beautifully suggests the aural experience. For the most part the piece conveys an ominous stillness occasionally ruffled by a flurry of skittering activity. The music has a sound closely related to spectralism of Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, but Hosokawa derives his harmonic language in this piece not from spectrum analysis but the harmonic characteristics of the shô itself, in which microtones are common. Cloud and Light, written in much the same idiom, uses the shô and full orchestra, and demonstrates Hosokawa's mastery of exquisitely colorful but understated instrumentation; it's an especially beguiling piece. Sakura für Otto Tomek is scored for the shô alone and offers a chance to clearly hear its distinctive qualities. Mayumi Miyata is the expert soloist and Alexander Liebreich leads Münchener Kammerorchester in poised, persuasive readings of the scores. The sound quality of the ECM album, produced by Manfred Eicher, could hardly be bettered.

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