Volume 24 Issue 4 - December 2018 / January 2019

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
Toshio Hosokawa – Orchestral Works 3
Basque National Orchestra; Jun Markl
Naxos 8.573733 (naxos.com)
!!
Multiple awardwinning
Japanese
contemporary classical
composer Toshio
Hosokawa (b.1955)
has built an illustrious
career rooted
in both his Japanese
birthplace and in
European, particularly
German, musical culture. Those bicultural
influences, drawing on Schubertian lyricism and
Webernian tone colouring, are seamlessly integrated
with intrinsically Japanese musical, theatrical,
aesthetic and spiritual elements.
Hosokawa has stated his philosophical goal
was to give “musical expression to the notion
of a beauty that has grown from 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.”
His orchestral triptych Meditation, Nach
dem Sturm, and Klage forms the heart of
this album. It is Hosokawa’s personal and
theatrical – in some places near cinematic –
response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and
tsunami. While Meditation mourns the many
victims of that tragedy, Nach dem Sturm
invokes oceanic turbulent darkness.
I find Klage the most moving and musically
convincing. Based on a poem and fragments
of letters by Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-
1914), Klage rages against human life taken by
the ocean. Haunting images in the lyrics – a
shattered body, lamenting dark voices, a lonely
boat sinking in stormy seas under “unblinking
stars” – are reflected in the music.
Hosokawa masterfully unleashes the
full power of the contemporary symphony
orchestra in Klage. It’s underscored by the
emotional power of the female voice, here
eloquently rendered by mezzo-soprano
Mihoko Fujimura, which serves as the work’s
consoling mother figure.
Andrew Timar
Concert Notes: Toshio Hosokawa is the Roger
D. Moore Distinguished Visiting Composer
during the University of Toronto Faculty of
Music’s New Music Festival this January. His
works are featured throughout the festival,
culminating with New Music Concerts’
Portrait of Toshio Hosokawa on January 25
at Walter Hall. Hosokawa is also featured in
the RCM’s 21C Festival with U of T Opera
presenting a double bill of his The Raven
featuring Krisztina Szabó, mezzo-soprano,
and The Maiden from the Sea (Futari
Shizuka) featuring Xin Wang, soprano and
Ryoko Aoki, Noh singer/dancer, also in Walter
Hall on January 17. On January 20 Esprit
Orchestra presents the Canadian premiere of
Hosokawa’s Concerto for Saxophone (with
Wallace Halladay as soloist) at Koerner Hall.
Global Sirens
Christina Petrowska Quilico
Fleur de Son FDS58046 (naxosdirect.com)
!!
The last Classical
& Beyond beat
column I wrote
for The WholeNote
(October 2013
issue) was titled
“Let’s Hear It for
the Women!” Now,
five years later, I
am pleased to be reviewing Global Sirens,
released last month by the exceptional (and
exceptionally busy) Canadian pianist and
educator, Christina Petrowska Quilico, and
featuring works by 15 women composers,
some known, most essentially neglected.
Several were born around the turn of the last
century; a few are still composing today.
As the title suggests, the 15 composers
– I’m about to give them their due and
name them all – hail from all over the
globe: Germany (Ilse Fromm-Michaels, Else
Schmitz-Gohr, Lotte Backes, Barbara Heller,
Susanne Erding); France (Lili Boulanger,
Cécile Chaminade, Germaine Tailleferre); Italy
(Ada Gentile); Canada (Larysa Kuzmenko);
USA (Meredith Monk, Adaline Shepherd);
Australia (Peggy Glanville-Hicks); South
Africa (Priaulx Rainer); and Russia (Sophie-
Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, who lived in
Winnipeg the last 20 years of her life). Some
had fathers who forbade or discouraged their
musical pursuits; others were expected to give
up composing once married. And because
her husband was Jewish, the Nazis banned
performances of works by Fromm-Michaels.
Petrowska Quilico covers a lot of ground
over the CD’s 19 tracks, from Chaminade’s
rich and romantic Méditation and Schmitz-
Gohr’s lovely Elegie for the Left Hand to
Backes’ jazzy, Debussyesque Slow and
Kuzmenko’s haunting and evocative
Mysterious Summer Night. And then there’s
Shepherd’s delightful Wireless Rag, yup, an
honest-to-goodness rag.
Let’s hear it for Christina Petrowska
Quilico, champion of women composers!
Sharna Searle
Frank Horvat – For Those Who Died Trying
Mivos Quartet
ATMA ACD2 2788 (atmaclassique.com)
!!
It is impossible
to escape Frank
Horvat’s mystical
hypothesis that
music is somehow
part of all human
DNA. It is also a
testament to the
genius of Horvat
that he is able to craft this into each segment
of this unique 35-movement string quartet so
that each so comes poignantly alive with the
personality of 35 Thai environmentalists and
human rights warriors who died in the act
of defending the truth. The magical experience
magnifies exponentially as one is struck
by the fact that the inspiration for all of this is,
further, inspired by a visual essay created by
photographer Luke Duggleby titled For Those
Who Died Trying.
Both Horvat and Duggleby have been transformed
by the senseless murders of the
35 Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). The
portraits of the HRDs made by the photographer
are starkly unglamorous images of
each defender. The musical resurrections are
Horvat’s as he melds the story of each life and
death, using a unique melodic language in
which the poignant sense of humanity and
tragic loss is never far from the surface of
each piece.
The Mivos Quartet, a unique string
ensemble, responds brilliantly to this music.
There’s a strong sense, in each of the 35
sections, of the quartet functioning like actors
in some powerful tragedy. Each musician, solo
and in ensemble, controls his forces with an
unfailing sense of the right emphasis and the
right moment together to deliver performances
of affecting power.
Raul da Gama
Weinberg – Symphony No.13; Serenade for
Orchestra
Siberian State Symphony Orchestra;
Vladimir Lande
Naxos 8.573879 (naxos.com)
! ! Starkly
contrasting works
by Mieczyslaw
Weinberg fill this
disc of worldpremiere
recordings,
part of Naxos’
projected 17-CD
compilation of
Weinberg’s orchestral music conducted by
Vladimir Lande.
The 13th of Weinberg’s 22 symphonies,
dating from 1976, is dedicated to the memory
of his mother, killed in the Holocaust along
with his father and sister. (In 1939, after
Germany invaded, the 19-year-old Weinberg
fled from Poland to live in the USSR.)
Weinberg’s sombre Symphony No.13
begins with a downcast melody for strings
that seems to wander, as if lost in a fog, for
more than three minutes. Scored for a large
orchestra (triple woodwinds, six horns),
the one-movement, 38-minute Symphony
contains other such long, gloomy, sparsely
textured passages, separated by agitated,
anguished tutti climaxes. It closes as bleakly
as it begins, with a few plucked harp notes
quietly fading away. Significantly, Weinberg
quotes from the opera he considered his
finest creation, The Passenger, set mostly
90 | December 2018 / January 2019 thewholenote.com