Toshio Hosokawa, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Momo Kodama, Seiji Ozawa, Mito Chamber Orchestra

Hosokawa / Mozart places a contemporary piano concerto next to the classical work that prompted it. Toshio Hosokawa wrote Lotus under the moonlight in 2006 for Momo Kodama, as a homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488. Kodama plays both concertos here with Seiji Ozawa and the Mito Chamber Orchestra, in a concert recording from Japan that waited fifteen years in the ECM archive.

The concerto was commissioned by Norddeutscher Rundfunk for the 2006 Mozart year. Kodama gave the first performance in Hamburg that April, with the NDR Symphony Orchestra under Jun Märkl. This recording comes from the Japanese premiere, in December 2006 at the Concert Hall ATM of Art Tower Mito, with Yoshinori Nishiwaki as Tonmeister. Hosokawa sets the soloist against a small orchestra of flute, clarinets, bassoons, horns, two percussionists and strings. Kodama had already paired Hosokawa with Debussy on her ECM solo album Point and Line, and the booklet carries notes by both composer and pianist.

In Lotus under the moonlight the piano stands for the lotus and the orchestra for the water and the nature around it. Hosokawa recalls that the lotus is the most highly valued flower in the Buddhist world. The music moves slowly, with long held string sounds and quiet piano figures, and the soloist's cadenza builds a contained intensity. Near the end, memories of Mozart's F sharp minor Adagio surface over trailing strings before the piece fades out. The Mozart follows in full, its bright opening Allegro giving way to that same Adagio and a quick, lightly stepping finale.

Writing in BBC Music Magazine in 2021, Jessica Duchen found that "the delicacy of the orchestration and the hushed quality with which movement shivers through the textures is little short of magical". She heard Kodama as "a subtle and poetic soloist in both works". Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews was cooler about the Mozart, warning that "those looking for a thrilling Mozart will not be able to punch their ticket here". In Le Devoir, Christophe Huss called the pairing with the source concerto pure logic, and judged the December 2006 tape well worth issuing.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2624, released on 12 March 2021, with a 32-page booklet.