This is one of the earliest classical music albums to be recorded using then-new DSD technology. From the album description on CDJapan (translated): "Recorded on July 27-29, 1998 at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space (1bit delta-sigma recording)."

N.B.: HRAudio lists three different issues of this album: the subject of this review, which is a single-layer SHM-SACD; Takemitsu: Spectral Canticle - Suzuki, a hybrid SACD; and Takemitsu: Spectral Canticle - Horigome, Suzuki, perhaps a repress of the hybrid disc.

What prompted this review of a 25 year-old SACD is the recent, excellent BIS release Takemitsu: Spectral Canticle - Karlsen, and exposure to music by Japanese composers-improvisers in the jazz genre that deepened my curiosity about Japanese contemporary classical music.

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) is noted for his orchestral and chamber compositions and his scores for the directors Kurosawa, Imamura and Teshigahara, which advanced the art of film music. Like the works on the BIS release Takemitsu: How slow the Wind - Lindberg / Otaka#, the pieces performed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under conductor Ryusuke Numajiri focus on the segment of Takemitsu’s orchestral writing that flows in a direct lineage from Debussy, and bypasses subsequent historical waves of serialism, minimalism, and spectralism.

Artists in Japan during the late-19th through mid-20th century experienced alternating periods of greater exposure to, and enforced isolation from, Western cultural influences. After World War II, restrictions were relaxed and barriers to East-West dialogue lifted, which allowed Takemitsu, a largely self-taught composer, to experiment with the methods of European composers as well as the instrumentation and rigor of earlier Japanese musical forms.

The 1998 recording of “Spectral Canticle”, with featured violinist Yuzuko Horigome and guitarist Daisuke Suzuki, differs from the recent performance by Viviane Hagner and Jacob Kellermann in ways that can certainly be attributed to their personal musical temperaments, but perhaps also to the Japanese musicians’ proximity to Takemitsu and to his recent death. In the 1998 performance, I detect a deeply-felt, elegiac quality, an intimation of the fragility of life. The piece, which was finished only a year prior to the composer’s death in 1996, like much of his orchestral writing, moves fluidly through passages of calm and meditative exposition.

The other four pieces in the recording offer the listener further room to experience the musical analog to the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi: the beauty that can be perceived in seeing brokenness not as a flaw, and impermanence not as a tragedy.

For its time, the sound quality of this recording would have been demonstration quality. Indeed, through good equipment, this early example of DSD recording reveals the precise placement of the string instruments on the L/R stereo panorama, and the depth of the soundstage in the woodwinds, brass and timpani.

Although this SHM-SACD is long out of print, at the time of writing, one of the hybrid SACD versions appears to be available through Amazon. Perhaps Tower Japan will do a reissue in the future.

Copyright © 2024 Mark Werlin and HRAudio.net

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