The Naxos Japanese Classics series has offered recordings
of music by Tōru
Takemitsu as well as a swathe of far less familiar names such
as Komei
Abe (1911-2006), Qunihico
Hashimoto (1904-1949) and Hisato
Ohzawa (1907-1953). What much of this music has shown is that
Japan’s fledgling foray into
Western Art Music was dominated by European models. Composers
travelled west to study with some of the foremost teachers of
their day. One would be hard pushed to identify some of it as
from the Land of the Rising Sun.
This present disc is the second in this series
dedicated to the music of Kósçak Yamada. Let me first clear
up a linguistic anomaly. Yamada’s give name was actually Kōsaku. The fanciful ‘Kósçak’ was a name he used
in the West, perhaps to ingratiate himself with a Europe not then used to Japanese
‘classical’ musicians. He should, however, rightly be known
as Kōsaku Yamada and it is a shame
Naxos did not at least acknowledge
this. That having been said, he was considered to be the earliest
and most important contributor to the development of Western
music in Japan. Yamada grew up in the
generation following the end of the power of the Samurai warriors
and Japan’s beginning of trade with
the outside world. It was a time of tremendous change in the
country and it is difficult to imagine that Western Arts Music
would have been able to get a foothold in the old Japan.
In 1904 Yamada entered The Tokyo Music School,
which was founded in 1879 to promote Western music. He studied
with two German teachers at the Music School and Yamada’s passion for
Western music and composing was soon recognised. His teachers
were able to get Yamada financial help from the Mitsubishi Corporation
to enable him to study with Max Bruch and Leopold Carl Wolff
at the Musikhochschule in Berlin in 1910. The models which
inspired and stayed with Yamada his whole career included Wagner,
Richard Strauss, Debussy and Skryabin. These influences would
be absorbed into Yamada’s musical personality, along with Japanese
classical music to create a unique but variable musical style.
It was during this period in Berlin that Yamada wrote the
music featured on the first Naxos CD dedicated to his music
(Naxos 8.555350).
Yamada went on to be an important figure in Japanese music during
the first half of the twentieth century, writing children’s
songs, conducting worldwide and being a powerful advocate for
music education.
It struck me as somewhat strange that the works
on this disc are presented in reverse chronological order. I
found it far more beneficial to play the works in the order
that they were written to better grasp the range of Yamada’s
style and development. The earliest work on this CD is the ‘Choreographic
Symphony’ Maria Magdalena from 1916-18 – a time when
Yamada had been working hard to help create some kind of infrastructure
for Western music in Japan. There hadn’t been a single
orchestra in Japan until 1911 and upon his
return from Berlin he helped to found several
orchestras and opera companies. Maria Magdalena shows
a very strong Richard Strauss influence. It was originally conceived
in 1916 as a half-hour ballet based on Maeterlinck’s play of
the same name. The ballet, however, was unrealised and so Yamada
re-worked his sketches into the Choreographic Symphony
as heard on this CD. This colourful score shows the influences
of Strauss and Wagner (at 6:46 and 13:04) very strongly and contains
some strikingly lyrical Straussian writing (eg 2:53). And is that a snatch
of Mahler’s First Symphony at 9:21?
The music is less derivative than perhaps I have made it appear
and I seem to have enjoyed it far more than Dan Morgan in an
earlier MusicWeb
review of this CD. Given its first performance in Carnegie Hall, New York City in 1918, this is
a very attractive symphonic poem which will give much pleasure.
A few years later Yamada composed what was to be
one of his most performed pieces, the Sinfonia Inno Meiji,
which was premièred in Tokyo in 1921 and then performed all
over Europe conducted by Yamada himself. This work represents
a move forward in Yamada’s style. The scent of Skryabin is never
far away in this work. Like Maria Magdalena, this is
a symphonic poem rather than a ‘symphony’ or ‘sinfonia’. ‘Meiji’
refers to the Emperor who ruled Japan between 1868 and 1912;
the time when Japan was changing it relationship
with the West. As well as a large post-Romantic orchestra, Inno
Meiji makes use of the Japanese double-reed instrument,
the hichiriki (at 13:38) and a great deal of percussion
(temple blocks abound!). However, I found the introduction of
the hichiriki rather intrusive and out of place rather
than it adding anything to the music. The opening three minutes
of this work are truly beautiful and show a well-developed ear
for orchestral colours and textures. Disembodied string chords
come out of nowhere, fragments of oriental-tinged melody are
then introduced one minute in and the textures thicken very
slowly. However, this opening section is quite episodic and
my interest soon waned somewhat. Finally, at 7:23 there is a beautiful melodic section where hints
of Wagner are heard for the first time in this work. Perhaps
because of its balletic origins, I didn’t find this piece flowed
nearly as well as Maria Magdalena and I was left strangely
unsatisfied, even after repeated listenings.
The latest work on this CD is the Nagauta Symphony
‘Tsurukame’ from 1934. It uses as its basis a piece of classical
Japanese music Tsurukame written in 1851 by Kineya Rokuzamon
X. The original Tsurukame was the first Noh-derived
Nagauta and was intended as a concert piece. It soon became
popular with dancers, however, and has enjoyed a great deal
of popularity in Japan ever since. Nagauta (literally ‘long
song’) is a genre of Japanese classical music which accompanies
kabuki theatre. This example is particularly significant;
tsuru means ‘crane’ (the bird) in Japanese, while kame
translates as ‘tortoise’. These two creatures represent long
life in Japanese culture. The music and text of Tsurukame
celebrate New Year in ancient China, the crane and tortoise blessing the Emperor with eternal
life. Yamada adds his own fairly traditional Western-style orchestral
music to this classical Japanese piece and the result is quite
startling – like the clash of two completely different cultures
rather than the unification of them. I found it all deeply unsatisfactory
and certainly the least successful music on this disc for my
ears.
The performances by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony
Orchestra, Takuo Yuasa and a host of Japanese musicians, including
five vocalists and a plethora of shamisens (Japanese
three-stringed lutes) in the Nagauta Symphony, are fine
enough. The recording quality by the engineers and producer
of Octavia Records in Japan, who were responsible
for the recording, do a fine job in capturing the very wide
range of textures and colours in this singular music.
Overall, this CD proved to be a fascinating snapshot
of the work of this important ‘early’ Japanese composer just
don’t expect any earth-shattering discoveries.
Derek
Warby
see
also Review by Dan Morgan
