Akira Imai Plays Contemporary Piano Music From Japan

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IF YOU LOOK at surveys of contemporary and modern classical music, you don't find many Japanese names. There's still a western bias when exploring works by contemporary classical music composers.

Chinese musicians have made inroads on the international scene – Lang Lang, Yundi Li, among them – and certain musicians of Japanese descent, such as Mitsuko Uchida, are world famous. But how many Japanese composers can one name? If you're not Japanese, you probably can't name any.

Here is what amounts to an introduction to the music of two leading contemporary Japanese composers, Akio Yashiro (1929-1976) and Mutsuo Shishido (born 1929). The vibrant pianist Akira Imai performs a sonata by Yashiro, followed by an adagio and presto by Shishido.

Fans of contemporary music should relish these works, as well as the urgent and precise playing of Imai, who has studied and lived in Germany and Austria.

Yashiro could well have been a composer whose fame might have blossomed had he lived longer; he died of heart failure at the age of 47. His music has the jagged prickliness that many modern composers have chosen as a signature. (It used to be that pianos resounded with the thundering clustered chords that demonstrated heroic ambition; now the initial aural sensation is of otherwise-unutterable anguish.) But Yashiro, who studied orchestration and composition with Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger, brought a wider textural approach to his piano work, especially this one; he seemed less in thrall to prevailing attitudes in contemporary music and, like Russian composers who were not consigned to the gulag of atonality, felt free to incorporate the small and piercing tonal shifts of traditional Japanese music as part of his tonal palette. 

Similarly, Shishido in this piece has a very modern, sometimes brusque, attack in his keyboard writing, almost abandoning himself to dissonance here and there. But he also calls to mind the rigorous exploration of strange folkloric sounds of none other than Béla Bartók. 

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