Toshio Hosokawa, Japan’s pre-eminent living composer, creates his distinctive musical language from the fascinating relationship between Western avant-garde art and traditional Japanese culture. His music is strongly connected to the aesthetic and spiritual roots of the Japanese arts (such as calligraphy), as well as to those of Japanese court music (such as Gagaku). He gives musical expression to notions of beauty rooted in transience: “We hear the individual notes and appreciate, at the same time, the process of how the notes are born and die: a sound landscape of continual ‘becoming’ that is animated in itself.”

This album is part of Klangforum Wien’s “Solo” 5-CD series of recordings of pieces for one performer, which is the ensemble’s response to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

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Recording: Mozart-Saal, Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna/Austria, August 2020.