Toshio Hosokawa, Münchener Kammerorchester, Alexander Liebreich

Landscapes gathers four works by the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, three of them built around the shō. This is the ancient Japanese mouth organ with seventeen bamboo pipes now heard mostly in the court music of gagaku. The soloist is Mayumi Miyata, for whom these shō pieces were written. Hosokawa writes for strings as an extension of the instrument's breath, so chords grow out of silence, swell and fade again. The result sits between ceremonial music and concert music, and between Japanese and European traditions.

Hosokawa was born in Hiroshima in 1955 and went to Germany in the 1970s to study with Isang Yun and Klaus Huber. He later turned back to the Japanese traditions he had grown up around. Miyata, a leading shō player who has worked widely in contemporary music, had appeared on ECM in Helmut Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. Here she is joined by the Münchener Kammerorchester under Alexander Liebreich. The recording was made in October 2009 at the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich-Sendling, produced by Manfred Eicher with Peter Laenger as engineer, and Paul Griffiths wrote the liner notes.

Landscape V (1993) was first written for shō and string quartet and is heard here with string orchestra. It opens the disc with a slow dialogue in which the strings take up the shō's high, sustained clusters. Ceremonial Dance (2000), for strings alone, refers in the composer's words to "the slow deliberate movements of gagaku", and uses silence and space as structural material. Sakura für Otto Tomek (2008) is a short solo for shō on the traditional cherry-blossom song, written for the eightieth birthday of a former director at the WDR. The closing Cloud and Light (2008), over twenty minutes long, adds muted brass and bright metallic percussion, including Japanese wind-bells, with a stormier passage near its middle.

Reviewers singled out the way soloist and orchestra merge. Andy Gill in The Independent compared the weightless drift of the music to Morton Feldman and Pauline Oliveiros, and summed it up in one word: "Exquisite." Gavin Dixon of Classical CD Review described chords "of inscrutably complex construction" that "emerge from nothing and then swell into the foreground, before receding back to silence." Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International wrote that Landscape V stays almost at the edge of audibility.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 2095, released in September 2011.