Takenouchi Hiroaki - Cosmo Haptic: Contemporary Piano Music From Japan (CD)

Release Date: 10/14/08

Piano music from Japan

For Takemitsu, walking through a garden was a quasi-musical experience, and that's the feeling one gets from Les yeux clos II, the late work by him in this collection. Debussy's sound-world is his source, but he pursues the argument into mystical realms; Hiroaki Takenouchi delivers it with gracefully expressive economy, as he does the eight other pieces he has chosen to reflect the pianistic tradition among Japanese composers schooled in the musical ways of the avant-garde West.

The other pieces which stand out here are Joji Yuasa's exquisite Cosmos Haptic ('relating to the sense of touch'), in which single notes and terse phrases are dropped like pebbles into a silent pool, and Sachivo Tsurumi's exuberant Toy2 for piano and electronics, in which the piano's timbre is decorated by gentle gurgles and burps.

Michael Church for BBC Music Magazine