"Music is calligraphy using sounds painted on the canvas of silence." The phrase by Toshio Hosokawa sums up the link between his music and the arts of Japan. This disc pairs three quintets for string quartet and a guest instrument with three solos for strings, played by the Arditti Quartet with the shō player Mayumi Miyata, the harpist Naoko Yoshino and the recorder player Tosiya Suzuki. It was placed on the quarterly list of the German Record Critics' Award (4/2014).

Hosokawa, born in Hiroshima in 1955, is a Japanese composer and a pupil of Isang Yun, who studied in Germany and found his voice in Japanese music and culture. The quartet here is Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan, violins, Ralf Ehlers, viola, and Lucas Fels, cello. The recording is a co-production with Südwestrundfunk. The quartet was founded by Irvine Arditti in 1974, when its members were students at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and Miyata is one of the best-known players of the shō.

In Landscape V (1993) for shō and string quartet, one of his most peaceful and static works, the strings and the Japanese mouth organ seem to merge into one oscillating instrument. It was influenced by the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko, where two almost identical colours are set side by side. Landscape II (1992) for harp and string quartet is marked instead by constant oscillation, and Fragmente II (1989) is heard in its version for recorder and quartet.

The solos are tied to people and events. Elegy (2007/08) for violin is a memorial to Miyako Umehara, wife of Hosokawa's friend the philosopher Takeshi Umehara; their daughter Himari Umehara first played it at the funeral. Threnody (2011) for viola is dedicated to the victims of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011. Small Chant (2012) for cello mixes flowing microtonal lines with strikingly consonant chords, close to a synthesis of European and Asian ideas of sound.

CD, Wergo WER 6769 2, released in 2014 in Wergo's Toshio Hosokawa series, 59 minutes.