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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Piano Concerto and a Symphony Worth Hearing, 2 May 2005
It is sad that the family of Japanese composer Hisato Ohzawa (1907-1953) had to, against the tides of fortune, preserve the scores of his works after his music dropped completely from sight after his death, and we are fortunate that the family preserved them so carefully for these two pieces are really worthwhile. After his death he became so obscure that he was not even remembered by very many in the Japanese music scene. He had been in the first generation of Japanese composers to study in the West and unlike many had spent several years in the US studying with the likes of Frederick Converse, Roger Sessions and Arnold Schoenberg. While in the US he was the first Japanese to conduct the Boston Symphony (in his own 'Little Symphony') before he went on to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After six years in the West he returned to Japan and remained there the rest of his life. He led an active life in the Kansei district (which includes his hometown, Kobe, as well as Osaka and Kyoto). But that was a conservative part of the country and his music had difficulty being accepted (although to our ears they are extremely easy to assimilate); he was not helped by the rudimentary state of Japanese orchestras in those days. His Third Piano Concerto has elements reminiscent of Rachmaninoff, Bartók and Ravel (with more than a soupçon of jazzy Gershwin thrown in). The outer movements are virtuosic, rhythmically interesting, and brilliantly orchestrated. Their harmonic language is French cum Russian, their thrust Bartókian. The middle movement, which begins with a smoky sax blues, surely was modeled to some degree on the second movement of Ravel's G Major Concerto with some cross-fertilization from Gershwin's Concerto in F. It is simply gorgeous. The performance here by Russian pianist Ekaterina Saranceva is sparkling and she is ably accompanied by the Russian Philharmonic under the up-and-coming Dmitry Yablonsky, also known to us as a fine cellist. The Concerto's subtitle, 'Kamikaze,' has little to do with the Japanese suicide bombers of World War II; written in 1938 (and subtitled at least partly to give the concerto a popular tinge) it is named after the civil airplane called the 'Kamikaze,' a feat of pre-war Japanese engineering that set a speed record between Tokyo and London and of which the nation was understandably proud. The Third Symphony, written just before the Second Concerto, was premièred in 1937 by the forerunner of the NHK Symphony to an indifferent response from the Tokyo public. It is subtitled 'Symphony of the Founding of Japan' to celebrate the 2600th anniversary of the country. (Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten. among others, also wrote pieces for the celebration.) In four movements, the first and longest movement is a dramatic, even brutalist, sonata-allegro which sounds a bit like Honegger with lots of pentatonic scale passages thrown in. The second movement, Adagio grazioso, is a bit misterioso, features much that sounds like French non-impressionist music (Roussel, Honegger) wedded with ceremonial Gagaku (Japanese court) music. Although mostly serene, there are some uneasy undercurrents. The charming third movement, Menuet con fantasia, is in rondo form (not the usual ABA minuet form), one section of which 'uses a bouncing pattern, called Pynkobushi' (I am indebted here to the detailed insert notes by Japanese musicologist and critic Morihide Katayama). The finale, Allegro non troppo con fuoco, bursts onto the scene with a fortissimo tutti clamor and then settles into a march rhythm until the Pynkobushi rhythm of the previous movement returns to lighten the atmosphere a bit. Another sonata-allegro (albeit rather free), this movement, with its contrasting first and second themes, subsides into a string chorale before leading to a complex and fascinating contrapuntal recombination of the original themes. Quite a feat of expert craft leading to fascinating and musically satisfying results. This work grew on me each time I heard it. If one makes some allowance for its emotional reticence (surely a carry-over of Ohzawa's French training), it is very nearly the equal of most of what was being written in Europe at the time. Recommended for those wishing to stray from the tried and true. TT=64:10 Scott Morrison
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