Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yasushi Akutagawa

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Insert included.

A document of the post-war Japanese musical generation at its most assured and most international - two of the three composers who, in 1953, formed the Sannin no Kai (Group of Three) and set out to lead Japanese art music into the second half of the twentieth century. Toshiro Mayuzumi and Yasushi Akutagawa (1925-1989) shared a formation at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and a conviction that Japan's musical future lay neither in imitation of the Western canon nor in simple folklorism, but in a synthesis yet to be invented.

The four works collected here on this Italian La Voce Del Padrone pressing chart the range of what that ambition produced in the early years. Mayuzumi's Bacchanale and Phonologie Symphonique - the latter an early electroacoustic-adjacent work exploring the phonological properties of orchestral sound - sit alongside Akutagawa's Music for Symphony Orchestra and Triptique for String Orchestra. Akutagawa's path was somewhat different from Mayuzumi's: more explicitly influenced by Prokofiev and the Soviet orchestral tradition, with a symphonic lyricism that gave his music immediate communicative force without sacrificing formal ambition. That the two composers could share a single LP without aesthetic conflict speaks to the breadth of the Sannin no Kai's project: not a manifesto but a willingness to pursue multiple answers to the same question.