|
The conductors
of these two memorial discs—Toru Takemitsu died on February 20, 1996,
in his 66th year—are masterful interpreters
of the greatest Japanese composer since Nippon opened to the West in the
19th
century. Both have excellent orchestras at their bidding. A single work is
common to both, Twill by Twilight—"in memory of one of
my good friends and a very unique composer, Morton Feldman," who died
the year prior to this fulfillment of this commission for the 25th
anniversary of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. If it's cerebral
music you expect to hear, take heart: Takemitsu seldom put on display a
formidable intellect he applied to the creation of all kinds of music,
whether for the concert stage, chamber ensembles, or films which were his
lifelong passion. (He scored 93 beginning in 1956, with a range of styles
you can sample, and be surprised by, on a Nonesuch sampler issued in 1997.)
Describing his title Twill
by Twilight, Takemitsu wrote, "The
twill weave of the music takes effect by means of an extremely limited
musical unit—or what we might better call the musical principle which
exists prior to the forming of the melody or the taking shape of the
rhythm. Subtle variations in pastel-like colors express the moment just
after sunset, when twilight turns toward darkness." Pictorial images
accompanied virtually all of his music, following a Webern period in the
late '50s and early '60s that produced atomized sounds—hardly ever
"pretty" in the context of his later music, which acknowledged
Debussy (Jeux in particular) and Olivier Messiaen as points of
departure.
While his titles may
seem arcane at first glance, most are pictographically rooted. He was
my Chicago houseguest for 10 memorable days
in 1969, which gave birth to Cassiopeia for solo percussionist (Stomu
Yamashâta) and orchestra—actually four orchestras arranged spatially
with percussion in the middle, just like the constellation he envisioned.
Takemitsu had dreamt that inspiration, he told us one morning with a wide
smile, after several days of abstracted concentration. In the tradition of
Asterism, this music turned out to be dense, dissonant, at moments ferocious—the
most neglected of his major works, because there has never been another
Yamash'ta to play it (who did so only twice, at the Ravinia Festival
premiere in 1971, and two months before that at a Tokyo recording session
for EMI with Seiji Ozawa conducting, never released in the west).
Asterism (which
he confided to me was the musical depiction of a nervous breakdown after
1966) and Cassiopeia were transitional works,
a bridge from Webernisms for pianists and chamber groups plus some musique
concrète. (The latter includes his hilariously
scatological, scandalous Vocalism: Ai for spoken voices, which NHK
banned when they discovered what several sound-alike words meant in other
languages.)
All of the music on
these two recent discs—except for Requiem,
Takemitsu's first concert work composed in 1957—comes from the last
decade of his life, when, in the lyrical prose of DG's annotator, his
music had become "enigmatic, murmuring and ever-flowing currents of
sound [that] recede into silence·colors of such breathtaking quality that
the sound becomes almost palpable."
His works never sound
quite the same way twice—neither do Debussy's
if you think about it—which is their great strength rather than a sign
of weakness. Takemitsu used a large orchestra in many works, starting
with Arc
in 1966 for piano and orchestra, but he used their resources
abstemiously—the opposite of such opulent colorists as Korngold or Richard
Strauss. Takemitsu was literally a spellbinder, even in a work that borrows
as overtly as Quotation of Dream (from Debussy's La mer—surprise,
not Jeux). Again, the sleeping poet awoke inspired to write.
All of his elliptical
titles make sense when you discover the root of their meaning in two
very solid sets of program notes. Deutsche Grammophon's—not
in a plastic jewel case but in an intricate cardboard structure that invites
dust onto the disc-surface once the seal is broken—give you more (but
be warned: a dithyramb on the inside jacket implies that conductor Knussen
rather than Takemitsu wrote the 12-part Quotation, dedicated to
pianists Peter Serkin and Paul Crossley, who were so close to Toru and his
music). Elsewhere, Knussen himself is as keenly verbal about this music as
he is a keenly attuned interpreter.
Interesting points
of departure between St.Clair and Knussen: in Twill
the California maestro takes 14:42, whereas his London-based colleague
needs only 12:39. Neither one is right or wrong—both pursue individual
expressive ends. St.Clair's orchestra, resident in the Orange Country
Performing Arts Center at Costa Mesa, California, is richer in sound yet
never distractingly so. And their performance of From me flows what
you call Time, a concerto for Nexus to play during the centennial
season at Carnegie Hall, is breath-stoppingly gorgeous. Of the seven works
and two
fanfares on this pair of discs, From me is my favorite, sharing a
special shrine with Spirit Garden (on a Denon CD co-featuring Gemeaux
and the first-ever recording of
Dream/Window).
It may amuse you that the last-named disc was a handoff from
R.E.B., who
dislikes Takemitsu as much as I dislike Ilya Muromets (allow me a
phonetic English selling rather than the phonetic French of that behemoth).
But hey, that's what makes a ballgame, as A. Nony Mous once ever so wisely
opined. As for Takemitsu and Gliere (and the Gobi desert and Japan Sea that
separate them), each had his artistic vision. If I prefer Takemitsu's
dream-begotten world of dawns and sunsets and pentagonal (as well as spirit)
gardens, it is the nature of this website that we cheerleaders can coexist
congenially at loggerheads, not needing to deny or disavow what we love,
what sustains us spiritually each in his own way.
R.D. (Sept. 2000)
|
