Hosokawa / Hellekant / Kawase - Toshio Hosokawa: The Raven - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The orchestral triptych of 'Meditation, Nach dem Sturm' and 'Klage' is award-winning composer Toshio Hosokawa's response to the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and tsunami. Meditation mourns the victims with a quiet song of sorrow, Nach dem Sturm uses shamanic elements to suggest stormy darkness and the hope of light, while the healing Klage seeks to connect our world with the supernatural. 'Autumn Wind' unifies man and nature through the timeless sound of the shakuhachi. The collaboration between Naxos and composer Toshio Hosokawa has been very fruitful in recent years, and this new follows on from two collections of orchestral works conducted by Jun Markl. Volme 1 of these Inchdraws magically delicate colors and rich textural intricacies from what is a profoundly attractive score.Inch (Gramophone on Lotus under the moonlight), and volume 2 Inchreinforce Hosokawa's commitment to poetic representations of human presences in the natural world.Inch (Gramophone). World-class vocal soloists in this recording include Danish soprano Susanne Elmark who has produced an aria recital for Naxos Denmark and mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura whose recordings include Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as part of Christian Thielemenn's Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra recordings on C Major. Tadashi Tajima is one of today's most respected shakuhachi players, having performed around the world. Album Tracks 1. Meditation - Basque National Orchestra 2. Nach Dem Sturm - Susanne Elmark/Ilse Eerens/Basque National Orchestra 3. Klage - Mihoko Fujimura/Basque National Orchestra 4. Autumn Wind - Tadashi Tajima/Basque National Orchestra

This is a new installment in the SWR Vokalensemble's country series. It contains excellent performances of rarely performed and recorded choral works. The SWR Vokalensemble is among the best choirs in the world. The accompanying booklet contains the Japanese texts of the works. In it's more than 2000-year history Japan has developed it's own, independent music, whose principal means of expression are single tones and tonal color, which is used in quite a broad spectrum, including sounds. References to nature and it's sounds is another aspect of great significance. This album presents a selection of choral works which were composed after 1950, at a time when a lot of Japanese composers began to free themselves from European and American music as their model and started to develop individual styles. In doing so, they also used elements of Japan's musical tradition and integrated them into their own musical language in various ways.

When the symphonic poem The Raven after Edgar Allan Poe celebrated it's premiere in London in March, 1900, the critics showered hymns of praise on his work so rich in unique orchestral colors and on it's young composer Josef Holbrooke. It brought him his breakthrough and firmly established his reputation as an innovative and original contemporary composer. There are certainly many settings of Poe's poem, but Holbrooke was the first composer who did not merely set the text but used it as the poetic basis for his first InchPoem for Orchestra.Inch Holbrooke's idiom was the musical language of the late nineteenth century obliged to the primacy of expression, and he enriched it with his constant quest for new tonal effects. In his orchestral variations on the beloved Scottish folk song InchAuld Lang SyneInch he again displays his extraordinary gift for employing his absolutely inexhaustible inventive talent and fine feeling for harmony in order to endow simple song forms with subtle expressive variety. Album Tracks 1. Theme Andante Espressivo 2. Variation 1 3. Variation 2 4. Variation 3 5. Variation 4 6. Variation 5 7. Variation 6 8. Variation 7 9. Variation 8 10. Variation 9 11. Variation 10 12. Variation 11 13. Variation 12 14. Variation 13 15. Variation 14 16. Variation 15 17. Variation 16 18. Variation 17 19. Variation 18 20. Variation 19 21. Variation 20 22. I. Allegro Con Molto Fuoco - Judith Ingolfsson/Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt 23. II. Adagio Non Troppo Con Molto Espressione - Judith Ingolfsson/Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt 24. III. Maestoso - Vivace Giocose - Judith Ingolfsson/Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt 25. The Raven, Op. 25