Folios of Light
Takashi Yoshimatsu (b.1953)
Piano Folio – Homage to the Departed Pleiades
Pleiades Dances
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023)
async – 3 excerpts
Dai Fujikura (b.1977)
Spring and Asura
Stanford Cheung (piano)
Recording details not supplied
Azure Sky AZ1007 [64]

Canadian pianist Stanford Cheung is featured in a splendid new recital of Japanese piano music recently released on the Azure Sky label. Pieces from Yoshimatsu’s Pleiades Dances form a vein running through the disc. The music is light and easily accessible. Cheung writes in the notes that the three featured composers “share a common thread of creating evocative, emotionally resonant music that pushes the boundaries of traditional piano literature”. I am not sure that many boundaries are pushed very far, but I enjoyed the recital very much and the programming Cheung has devised is intelligent and satisfying. The disc can be dipped into or listened to in one continuous span as desired.

Yoshimatsu enjoyed a period in the 1990s when he was effectively the composer in residence at Chandos. The company made 7 CDs of his orchestral music in Manchester. His piano cycle Pleiades Dances is a huge corpus of work divided into nine books each containing seven pieces. The dances are all piano preludes and many are pearls of real beauty. The first book (set) was composed in 1986 and the last dates from 2001.

Kyoko Tabe recorded the first five books on Denon in 1996. At that time, it was complete. Five years later she put down a second volume, completing the cycle, including the newly composed sets. I have not heard this record which was released on Japanese (Nippon) Columbia, and don’t know how easy it would be to source today. The great pianist Pascal Rogé has also recorded excerpts from Pleiades Dances, which he coupled with Satie – clever and very effective – for the Triton label.

Yoshimatsu is obviously fascinated by astronomy and the star cluster Pleiades in particular, which he associates with unity and serenity. He allows performers free-reign to change tempi, dynamics and even frequency of repetition within the dances. On this CD, Cheung plays thirteen of the pieces, including all of set 6 (1998) and selections from sets 1, 3 and 9. He also includes a supplementary homage to Pleiades as a prelude.

Beginning with this prelude, we are launched into a world of calm spirituality. The next piece has a subtitle of summer pastoral and this is apt. A couple more dances concludes this first group by Yoshimatsu. The piano sound is warm and clear. Dynamics are mostly gentle and speeds on the slow side. Stanford Cheung plays sensitively on a very mellow sounding Fazioli. The music doesn’t strike one as innately Japanese at all. Come to think of it, Takemitsu’s best compositions probably wouldn’t be identified as sounding Japanese to a novice, but one can feel the provenance when one studies the music. Cheung in his writings suggests he has curated this programme to show how these composers wrote in a universal and harmonious global language; genre-fluid he calls it.

Sakamoto is represented on the disc by three pieces adapted from his 2017 album async. The composer is probably known best for his film music, having won an Oscar for his score for The Last Emperor in 1987. He wrote async whilst battling with cancer. The pieces we hear from the work are Ubi, Andata and Solari. They seem influenced by French Impressionism and these piano transcriptions are very moving.

Ubi is imbued with sadness; a shifting repetitive chord sequence moves through different tonalities like a Satie work. Stanford Cheung feels the work eventually ends in hope. I’m not so convinced. Andata moves at a slow tranquil pace and contains a nostalgically tender theme; it is a very reflective piece. In Solari a Bach prelude forms the theme on which Sakamoto’s skills in harmonic invention work to create a piece rich in depth and expression. The three movements are split and surrounded in the recital by more Pleiades Dances with which they blend nicely.

Sakamoto’s other music on the disc appears at the end. Aqua paints an underwater world in sound. It is cinematic in structure but in this transcription, it stands as a perfectly constructed gem of lyricism. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is a film (starring David Bowie) for which Sakamoto wrote the music in 1983. This little tone-poem has a very Japanese theme (finally) and is hauntingly beautiful. I believe it is very famous in Japan and I can see why Cheung chose it to end the record. In contrast to most of the pieces he includes, this one gets a bit lively (from 2:38) with a speeding up and a ratcheting up of passion. The ending is particularly good.

Fujikura is from a younger generation than the other two composers heard so far. Spring and Asura is a well-crafted work from 2019 in two parts. Spring is light with gentle cascades on top of a probing melody. It is meant to celebrate the rebirth and renewal of the natural world, the season brings. The piece moves seamlessly into Asura which is darker and more uneasy. The Asura in some beliefs are demonic beings, representing the struggle between good and evil. This grand piece ends with a fantastic cadenza from 5:39.

Yoshimatsu’s Pleiades Dances are carefully positioned in three parts of the recital. I like this; it allows the listener to listen to them in smaller clusters. The middle group of five (tracks 6-10) are all from book 6 and fit together perfectly. Evocative titles like Romance to Languid, Autumn Barcarolle or Lullaby of the Starry Night are helpful but not mandatory, I think.

I enjoyed this CD. The music is very chilled and calming and the sound very fine. One must not assume, however, that this style of music sums up neatly Japanese piano music as a genre. Japan, a country with a population of 125 million has many significant contemporary composers with very different voices working around the world in a myriad of styles. This record is a nice snapshot of three of them, and the choice, as ever, is subjective. It will be interesting to hear Stanford Cheung in other repertory, though, and I look forward to his new projects on Azure Sky.

Philip Harrison

Buying this recording via the link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free.

Details
Pleiades Dances I, Op. 27 – No. 4 and 5
Pleiades Dances III, Op. 35 – No. 1, 3 and 5
Pleiades Dances VI, Op. 71 – Complete
Pleiades Dances IX, Op. 85 – No. 4 and 6