Keiko Harada

This portrait of Keiko Harada gathers three works for accordion and piano written over eight years: F-fragments for both instruments (2012), Book I for accordion solo (2010) and seven pieces from Nach Bach for piano solo (2004). The duo piece, about half an hour long, is the core of the record. Harada wrote it in 2012, while what the label calls Japan's third major incident of radioactive contamination was still unfolding.

Harada was born in Tokyo on 17 April 1968. She studied composition, piano, chamber music and conducting at the Toho Gakuen College of Music, taking her composition degree in 1993. Her teachers included Akira Miyoshi, and she attended international seminars with Brian Ferneyhough. In Europe she became known above all through her chamber music with accordion. The accordionist here is Stefan Hussong, a pupil of Hugo Noth in Trossingen and a professor at the music university in Würzburg. The pianist is Yumiko Meguri, who teaches at Toho Gakuen. F-fragments is dedicated to the two of them, and the accordion was tuned for the sessions by Pedro Gomes da Silva.

F-fragments takes as its motif the tension between the energy of the human body and the radioactivity and harassment that are destroying it. It is a chain of short, sharply drawn panels with titles such as "Twin Leaves", "Speedy", "Noise" and "Fall Time Blues", some lasting barely more than a minute. Book I pursues a different idea: the inner condition of the performer is composed at the moment of performance. Each of its four movements has its own character, and each asks the player to take on a different role, using every technique with all five senses open. Nach Bach refers to the Well-Tempered Clavier and consists of 24 pieces, each taking Bach's music as it wells up from the depths and reworking it. Meguri plays seven of them here.

The critic Ayumu Yasutomi, quoted by the label, describes a composer who accepts "the movement of her own soul" as the source of her work. He adds that her ear seems to discern "the sound in which a leaf lives". Harada's music has received the Akutagawa Award for orchestral composition (2001) and the Otaka Prize (2009). Hussong and Meguri returned to her music for a second Wergo album, Midstream: Duos, in 2017.

CD, Wergo WER 6786 2, released in 2014 (total time 64'24").