Takemitsu: Between Tides; Rocking Mirror Daybreak; A Way a Lone; Hika; Landscape I; Distance de fée
Published:
COMPOSERS: Takemitsu
LABELS: BIS
WORKS: Between Tides; Rocking Mirror Daybreak; A Way a Lone; Hika; Landscape I; Distance de fée
PERFORMER: Ensemble Kaï
CATALOGUE NO: CD-920
This is a useful conspectus of Takemitsu’s chamber works, spanning more than 40 years and illustrating his ongoing debt to French music. Distance de fée (1951) is a delicate, beautiful clone of Forties Messiaen; Messiaen is still there, but utterly transfigured (as are Debussy and Ravel) in the maturely Romantic expanses of the piano trio Between Tides (1993), marvellously rich in sound and by any standards a major contribution to its genre. In between comes the Cubist objectivity of Landscape I for string quartet, the angular elegiacs of Hika, the tremulous evocation of A Way a Lone, and the piercing sound-glyphs of the violin duo Rocking Mirror Daybreak. Takemitsu confessed himself unable to write fast music, and certainly there is none here: but between melancholic-ecstatic contemplation of nature and a slow-spun geometry of sound there is plenty of variety of texture, tone and utterance. The Japanese players of Ensemble Kai appear completely at one in their total identification with the music and its expressive objects, and are well served by BIS’s superbly focused recording. A must for all who find the late Japanese master’s musical personality sympathetic. Calum MacDonald