Seiji Ozawa
Seiji Ozawa (1935-2024) was a Japanese conductor, born to Japanese parents in Shenyang, China. He was music director of the Toronto and San Francisco symphonies before leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1973 to 2002. In 1983 he conducted the premiere of Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise in Paris, and he long championed Toru Takemitsu. Recordings include Toshio Hosokawa's Lotus under the moonlight with Momo Kodama on ECM.
Sinfonia / Symphony No. 1
John Harbison's music draws together gestures and ideas from musical worlds that reflect such favorite composers as Robert Schumann and Heinrich Schutz, the songs of George Gershwin, and the hieratic qualities of Igor Stravinsky. His work has always been expressive, though never with a heart-on-sleeve emoting of personal angst, a mode that simply does not interest him. Recently Harbison has shown an interest in recapturing such historical genres as the formal set of variations (as in his Variati…
Piano Concerto
The Piano Concerto was Peter Lieberson's first orchestral work and was, from the outset, conceived with Peter Serkin in mind as the soloist. He wrote it after a long period of immersion in the study of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. Throughout what Lieberson regards as the "journey" of the Piano Concerto, the character of each movement changes dramatically, though the very tune that unfolds at the opening of the work returns in full just before the end. Each of the three movements reflects in a mus…
When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd
Of the numerous settings of Walt Whitmans poetry, and this poem in particular, Sessions's is generally agreed to be one of the very finest and most sensitive. His mature style - a highly personal, instantly recognizable mix of severity and control with passion and serenity - projects the poetry now in simple chordal declamation, now in the long, high-arched melodies of which he is the master, conveying wonderfully the feel and variety of Whitman's lines. Over the years, Sessions's elegy has ta…
Hosokawa / Mozart
Toshio Hosokawa's piano concerto Lotus under the moonlight (2006), a homage to Mozart, paired with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488. Momo Kodama, piano, with the Mito Chamber Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa, recorded live at Art Tower Mito in December 2006.