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570337 bk Matsumura 24/6/11 10:56 Page 1 8.570337 was revised the following year, with the entire work darkness deep behind the whites of their penetrating RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra undergoing final revision in 2006 for this recording. It eyes, Matsumura felt as if he had heard their sorrowful DDD was the last time that Matsumura worked on its voices. The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra plays a central rôle in classical music orchestration, and this recording represents the first Symphony No. 2 is more flexible in style than his in Ireland, through live performance, broadcast and touring. As an integral part ever performance of the final version. earlier works, open to various influences from of RTÉ, the orchestra reaches a great number of listeners through its weekly Matsumura’s inspiration for writing this elements of Western classical music, including broadcasts on RTÉ lyric fm and through its association with the European symphony came from the sight of a poster of the tonality. Symphony No. 1 and Prelude for Orchestra, Broadcasting Union (EBU). In addition to its annual subscription season, Kongorikishi at Kofukuji (a famous temple in Nara). on the other hand, insist on an Asian sensibility. Horizons contemporary music series, national tours and summer concerts Teizo Kongorikishi, also known as Nio, are a pair of sumo- Matsumura believed that transcendent music, as series, the orchestra continues to make a name for itself internationally through wrestler-like statues standing at the entrance of represented by Bach and Mozart, is inherently imbued its recordings with Naxos, Marco Polo and on the RTÉ label. In 2004, the RTÉ MATSUMURA Buddhist temples. With angry countenances and with a certain “flexibility”. Symphony No. 2 is NSO won the Orchestra and Concerto: CD Première category of the Critics’ imposing musculature, the statues act as guardians of Matsumura’s spiritual monologue, full of both sorrow Awards in the Cannes Classical Awards for its recording of Joly Braga Santos’ the Buddha. One of the pair, with mouth agape, is and hope, marking the close of the twentieth century. Symphony No. 4 under conductor Álvaro Cassuto (Marco Polo 8.225233). In called A-gyo and the other with mouth closed is 2005, Gerald Barry’s opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was released on known as Un-gyo. “A” denotes the first note when Koichi Nishi the RTÉ label to considerable acclaim, as part of a new Composers of Ireland someone opens his mouth and “Un” denotes the last series. This has been followed by CDs of work by Raymond Deane, Seóirse note when one closes his mouth. The two figures thus Edited and translated by Akihiko Ushio Bodley, Deirdre Gribbin and Ian Wilson, the latter three on the RTÉ lyric fm can represent the beginning and the end of the and Jeffrey L. Hart. Adapted by Naxos label. www.rte.ie/nationalsymphonyorchestra Symphonies universe. Witnessing their fierce appearance, with Takuo Yuasa Nos. 1 and 2 Takuo Yuasa was born in Osaka, where he studied piano, cello, flute and Ikuyo Kamiya clarinet. At eighteen he left Japan to study in the United States at the University of Cincinnati, before studying conducting in Europe with Hans To the Night of The leading Japanese pianist Ikuyo Kamiya began the piano at the age of eight, studied under Aiko Iguchi at the Swarowsky at the Vienna Hochschule, then with Igor Markevitch in France Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo and, following her first prize at the Japan Music Competition, was and with Franco Ferrara in Siena before he became assistant to Lovro von Gethsemane chosen to study at the Essen National Academy in Germany, where she was a pupil of Klaus Hellwig and Stefan Matacic, working with him in Monte Carlo, Milan and Vienna. Since Askenaze. Her international career was launched following her victory at the 1972 Queen Elisabeth International winning a Special Award at the Fitelberg International Conducting Music Competition, after which she was invited to perform throughout Belgium at various festivals in recital and Competition in Katowice, Poland, Takuo Yuasa has frequently conducted the as a soloist with orchestras including the Brussels National Orchestra and the Antwerp Orchestra. She has since major Polish orchestras, including the Warsaw National Philharmonic and collaborated with leading orchestras and distinguished colleagues throughout the world. Ikuyo Kamiya is known Photo: Akira Kinoshita Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestras. He regularly performs for her wide repertoire, and has made twenty recordings on the RCA label, including acclaimed recordings of the throughout Europe and the Far East. In Japan he has held the position of Principal Conductor with the Gumma major Beethoven sonatas. She continued to record on the Fontec label and in 2001 released a CD marking the Symphony Orchestra and in the United Kingdom he has been Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish 35th anniversary of her début featuring the Grieg Piano Concerto and Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Symphony Orchestra and of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland. He has a successful recording career as an Ikuyo Kamiya, Piano Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio and Chosei Komatsu. In 1988 she received the prestigious exclusive Naxos artist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, Arts Festival Award of Japan. She is currently professor at Kyoto Municipal University. BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and others, with a wide range of repertoire which covers Britten, Macmillan, Rawsthorne, Webern, Schoenberg, Honegger, Vieuxtemps, MacDowell, RTÉ National Schubert, Rimsky-Korsakov, Pärt, Górecki, Glass and Nyman, and the Japanese composers Mayuzumi, Ohki, Bekku, Yashiro, Moroi, Akutagawa and Yamada. This versatility is recognised by orchestras around the world, who Symphony Orchestra engage him to conduct standard core repertoire as well as less well-known pieces by major composers. Takuo Yuasa 8.570337 5 8.570337 6 570337 bk Matsumura 24/6/11 10:56 Page 2 Teizo Matsumura (1929-2007) of hospital and once again started living in the were to be reflected in his later works. Becoming deeply focusing on a single core. Piano Concerto No. 2 is one write music “conceived of with an Asian mindset” and Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 • To the Night of Gethsemane kindergarten. The work ultimately was awarded first involved in drama combined with music, he was of Matsumura’s most popular works. It has been “full of primitive energy directly rooted in the very prize in the competition and was given its première by naturally inclined to write an opera, an effort that would performed in many countries including the United origins of life”. The classic work for which he felt the Teizo Matsumura completely unaware later of how he had arrived back the NHK Symphony Orchestra under the direction of bear fruit later in his life. States, England, France and Russia. The conductor strongest affinity was Stravinsky’s Le sacre du reached the zenith of home that day. This incident turned out to be his crucial Kazuo Yamada. This marked his début as a professional Achime (1957), Music for String Quartet and Piano Valery Gergiev has performed this concerto, as well as printemps, but its optimistically diatonic melodies and his creativity in Japan encounter with music. Entering the Third High School composer. Akira Ifukube, who sat on the jury, highly (1962), Symphony No. 1 (1965) and Prelude for Prelude for Orchestra, since 1986. Tikhon clear rhythms linked to dance were no longer the after World War II. He in 1945, at the age of sixteen, he formed a music club praised Matsumura for his “attitude of speaking Orchestra (1967) were conceived with an Asian Khrennikov, then Secretary of the Union of Soviet sound he was seeking. Groping his way forward, he started his professional and devoted himself to music more ardently than ever sincerely in his own language”, and with that, mindset. Matsumura’s attempts to write symphonies Composers, also praised this work as “one of the most gradually became obsessed with a vague image of an career as a composer before. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1949, and in Matsumura determined to study with Ifukube. A pupil were accompanied by considerable difficulty, however, important piano concertos of the twentieth century.” enormous accumulation of chaotic sounds, until one later than such August of that year he travelled to Tokyo, turning to the of the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin, Ifukube as he had to confront the task of writing for a European In 1980 the Suntory Music Foundation day he was inspired by a photograph of a group of contemporaries as composer Yasuji Kiyose for help in preparation for the encouraged Matsumura to write music imbued with orchestra using one of the most orthodox forms in commissioned an opera from Matsumura. Based on a many stone images of the Buddha. These took on the Toru Takemitsu, entrance examination for admission to Tokyo University primitive energy, and Tcherepnin’s idea that “Western Western music, all the while maintaining an Asian novel of the same title by Shusaku Endo, Silence treats appearance of a huge swarm of locusts, wildly Toshiro Mayuzumi, Joji Yuasa, Akio Yashiro and of the Arts. civilization is now stuck in history and Asian consciousness. On the way he produced a trial piece the subject of God and man in seventeenth-century sweeping over the earth. Overwhelmed by the image, Michio Mamiya, as he was forced to spend a long five- In Tokyo, living and working in a kindergarten civilization will move to the forefront” further enhanced with limited instrumentation, Music for String Quartet feudal Japan, when Christianity was forbidden. It took he determined to write an orchestral work full of such and-a-half years from the age of 21 convalescing from (happily, he was free to use their piano), Matsumura Matsumura’s inclination to create non-European music.