Point and Line interleaves the twelve Etudes that Claude Debussy wrote in 1915 with six Etudes composed between 2011 and 2013 by Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955). The pianist Momo Kodama, born in Osaka and trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris, abandons Debussy's order and builds a single sequence across a century. Debussy looked to the East for new sounds, and Hosokawa joins Japanese and European tradition, so the two cycles meet halfway.
This is Kodama's second ECM album, after La vallée des cloches with music of Ravel, Takemitsu and Messiaen. It was recorded in January 2016 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stephan Schellmann as engineer. Four of the Hosokawa studies are dedicated to Kodama herself. In her booklet note she hears in Hosokawa elements close to Debussy: "the freedom of form and tone colour, the sense of poetic design".
The disc opens with Debussy's Pour les arpèges composés and moves straight into Point and Line, Hosokawa's second study, which gives the album its title. His titles point to calligraphy and to line as gesture: Calligraphy, Haiku, 1 Line, 2 Lines, Ayatori, Magic by 2 Hands, 3 Lines. Ayatori is the Japanese string game, and at nine and a half minutes this is the longest piece here. Sometimes Kodama sets the composers against each other, as when the dark, violent Anger leads to the bright Pour les notes répétées and Pour les octaves that close the album. Elsewhere 2 Lines passes into Pour les sonorités opposées with no sense of a break.
In The Guardian (2017) Kate Molleson found her touch "immaculate and diligent, neatly flamboyant in the Debussy and reassuringly robust in the Hosokawa". Christopher Dingle made it an Instrumental Choice in BBC Music Magazine, noting that "Kodama brings a wonderful capacity for stillness to Hosokawa's often ascetic language". Michael Dervan in The Irish Times observed that her Debussy plays down the étude-like nature of the pieces.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2509, released on 27 January 2017, with a booklet essay by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich.
