Momo Kodama – Claude Debussy, Toshio Hosokawa: Point And Line (2017) [ProStudioMasters FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Claude Debussy, Toshio Hosokawa – Point And Line – Momo Kodama (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:21 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: ProStudioMasters | Booklet, Front Cover | © ECM Records
Recorded: January 2016, Historischer Reitstadel, Neumarkt

Born in Osaka and educated at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, Momo Kodama is well-placed to approach music from both Eastern and Western vantage points, as she does in this album which interweaves etudes of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955). Both composers have similarly been border-crossers. Debussy, pointing to music of the future, looked to the Orient for inspiration. Hosokawa has long combined aspects of Japanese and European tradition in his contemporary compositions. Momo Kodama’s insights into Toshio Hosokawa’s sound-world are profound. She is one of the outstanding performers of his work, and the composer has dedicated several works to her, including four of the six Etudes for piano included here, all composed between 2011 and 2013: “Caligraphy, Haiku, 1 Line”, “Lied, Melody”, “Ayatori, Magic by 2 Hands, 3 Lines” and “Anger”.

Momo Kodama: “A number of elements in Hosokawa’s music make me sense a proximity to Debussy. One is the freedom of its formal design; another is its interplay and layering of colours. What I find especially remarkable in both is a capacity for poetic utterance that ranges widely between lyricism and drama, between meditation and virtuosic display. Fascinating blends of light and shade, of grand gestures and minimalist refinement, virtually invite us to combine them while at the same time paying attention to their differences and independence.”

This sense of shared aesthetic correspondences emboldened Kodama to alternate etudes of the two composers in the present recording. As she points out in her performer’s note, although Debussy’s Études – written in 1915 – are conventionally performed as a cycle, it wasn’t always that way: “Reading Debussy’s letters to his publisher, I discovered that he did not compose his Études in the order in which they appear in print today. And at the time it was perfectly natural not to treat printed études of this sort as a mandatory cycle, but to perform them singly or in groups of two or three.” Together with producer Manfred Eicher Kodama developed the idea of placing the two cycles – Debussy’s and Hosokawa’s – in juxtaposition, creating an “interrelated dialogue” between them.

Kodama: “Once I had lit on my idea and tried it out, I took a liking to this version. The alternation brought out many a detail in each composer more sharply and placed it in more deliberate focus. In this way, the connection between the two composers grew more and more dear to my heart. In a quite general sense, the correlation between Debussy and Hosokawa has heavily influenced and reconstituted the way I view their music.”

Tracklist:
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
1 Pour Les Arpèges Composés Etude XI 4:52
Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
2 Point And Line Etude II 7:01
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
3 Pour Les Quartes Etude III 4:58
Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
4 Calligraphy, Haiku, 1 Line Etude III 2:04
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
5 Pour Les Sixtes Etude IV 4:18
Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
6 2 Lines Etude I 5:10
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
7 Pour Les Sonorités Opposées Etude X 5:33
8 Pour Les Tierces Etude II 4:15
9 Pour Les Huit Doigts Etude VI 1:49
Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
10 Lied, Melody Etude VI 4:51
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
11 Pour Les “Cinq Doigts” – D’après Monsieur Czerny Etude I 3:18
12 Pour Les Accords Etude XII 4:31
13 Pour Les Agréments Etude VIII 5:01
Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
14 Ayatori, Magic By 2 Hands, 3 Lines Etude IV 9:29
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
15 Pour Les Degrés Chromatiques Etude VII 2:27
Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
16 Anger Etude V 3:12
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
17 Pour Les Notes Répétées Etude IX 3:29
18 Pour Les Octaves Etude V 2:53