Toshio Hosokawa: Meditation, Nach dem Sturm & Klage

Album review

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan in March 2011, the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955) decided to honour the dead with three great orchestral works: Meditation – to the victims of the tsunami from 2011-2012, Nach dem Sturm ("After the Storm") for two sopranos and orchestra, from 2015, and Klage for soprano – here in a version for mezzo-soprano – from 2013-15. Far from seeking to evoke the terrifying violence of the natural disaster, Hosokawa has preferred to look closely at the human aspect of the story. And so, we hear funereal threnodies, shamanic singing, the heart-rending cries of a mother looking for the body of her child among the rubble, all in a language of intense sobriety which, for all that, carries a phenomenally powerful emotional charge. The album closes with Autumn Wind for shakuhachi and orchestra (2011), written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 1861 foundation of the Kingdom of Italy, after decades of domination by the Austrian Habsburgs. What is a shakuhachi, you ask? It is a traditional Chinese flute, adopted into the Japanese tradition for over a thousand years, and very popular today with modern and even jazz composers for its very unusual sound, at once soft and distant. © SM/Qobuz