Landscapes. Takemitsu, Hosokawa, Nishimura…

Sad news with the passing last September of Akira Nishimura, the day before his 70th anniversary. He was an important figure of avant-garde music in Japan and left us with Pulses of Light one of the most striking recent string quartets, a breathtaking compendium of the technical and sonic possibilities of this ensemble. The rest of this album by the Lotus String Quartet highlights great pages of modern Japanese music from the “extraordinary generation” (Takemitsu, Miyoshi, Yashiro) still very much inspired by Western modern music, mostly the Second Viennese School. It also performs Landscape I, an iconic work by Nishimura’s contemporary Toshio Hosokawa.