Toshio Hosokawa’s music recalls the calligraphic lines of Japanese script, but, as he puts it, ‘at the limit of time and space’. Hosokawa reframes the very way we experience the guitar; traditional folk music retains its essence, but via a Hosokawa lens; the guitar enters another universe. Gguitarist Jacob Kellermann, together with Christian Karlsen (with whom he has already recorded works by Toru Takemitsu on BIS-2655), the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, and soprano Ilse Eerens, presents this disc of music of preternatural subtlety.
The Two Japanese Folk Songs for soprano and guitar date from 2003 and are Hosokawa’s first attempts at folksong relocation. Or is that location? He has spoken about composing music that has a ‘body’ that unites ‘flesh and spirit’. . Japanese folk songs (and ancient sites) hold an energy has has been handed down via generations: it has filtered through, perhaps. The result is haunting in extremis. We also meet the soprano Ilse Eerens, who has a beautifully pure voice. These are not short ‘settings’: the first is one seven minutes, the second five. Here’s the first, “Kuroda-bishi”. Listen to the sensitivity of Jacob Kellermann’s playing, and how Eerens and Kellermann listen so closely to each other:
I love how Hosokawa is so concentrated in his ideas. In the first movement of his Serenade (which he describes as night music and a song for lovers) he treats the guitar like a koto, saying that he “wanted to evoke the depth often night in a single note”. Ambitious, but how evocative this serenade is, almost improvisatory at times, those lovely note-bends taking us to another, more Eastern world perhaps:
… while the second, “Dream Path,” concentrates on repetitions of harmonic sequences:
Again scored for soprano and guitar, Renka (1986) deliberately maps calligraphy, specifically the brush stroke sen, onto the vocal line, while minutely notating tone colour within vowelsHeterophony (multiple simultaneous versions of the same line) is used in the first wo movements. Here’s the first:
The second has moments where the music threatens to retreat into silence; at others, a mere move to mezzo-piano seems to hold worlds of pain. It is a song of parting (O to gather up and fold / To run with heavenly fire / That road you must travel away from me):
The final movement likens an oarless boat adrift to the protagonist’s love, which has no path to follow. The guitar is the lapping of the sea’s waves; the singer’s line is indeed bereft and, as fits the text, vibratoless, blanched as if numbed of emotion. Eerens is spectacular in achieving this:
The piece for guitar and strings with percussion, Voyage IX “Awakening” begins so quietly I had to turn up the volume to check it had started. And so it should; the BIS recording is absolutely full spectrum. In Hosokawa’s Voyage series, the soloist represents man and the orchestra the universe, Nature and the world both outside and within. Here, Hosokawa imagines the guitar as a lotus flower, and the strings are water (a pond). That opening is vibrations on the water surface. Different registers represent different parts of the flower, the lower register the roots down to the mud, the higher the air and sky above.
The flower and I are one – the song of the flower is mine; the awakening of the flower represents my self-puificaion, my self-awakening.
The music has an internal glow, but buzzing strings imply darker forces, the murkiness below, perhaps. Percussion is initially used delicately, like temple bells, but later offers stronger, if not overly disruptive, comment. Dedicated to Timo Korhonen, the piece was composed during a residency in Berlin and, to my ears, it seems to represent the very essence of Hosokawa:
A year’s cycle of folksongs, the 12 Japanese Songs came as quite a surprise after Voyage IX. It in one sense beings the disc full circe, as we started with Hosokawa’s settings of two Japanese folk songs; now there is a dozen which track a year, starting in April (“Sakura”) the freshnes of May comes as a surprise! Glorious!
The only arrangement that is not new is indeed “Sakura,”which was made in 2004; the rest day from 2022. The founding melody of Sakura has a melody whose date is unknown, as do those of June (Children’s Play Song) and March (Lullaby of Edo). The others wee composed in the Meiji period (1868-1912) or more recently, when Weser music had reached Japan. here is such beauty here: here’s Sakura, April; and notice how the mood shifts to a brighter light in May (Brook of Spring):
The simplicity of July (Hometown) seems to go straight to the heart in a very child-like way. Is this the Japanese guitar equivalent of Schumann’s Kinderszenen?:
… and there’s something particularly lovely about August, “Buddhist Monk in the Mountains”:
This whole disc offers a moment of reflection where time stops: Hosokawa’s music is rarefied, elusive, a miracle in itself.
This simply beautiful disc is available at Amazon here, currently at 16% off. Streaming below.
