The first ECM New Series album by the Japanese pianist Momo Kodama traces a line through French piano music of the twentieth century. It runs from the shimmering surfaces of Ravel's Miroirs to Messiaen's La fauvette des jardins (1970), one of the composer's last great works for solo piano. Toru Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch (1982) stands between them like a walkway, music from the East shaped by Western experiment. The album takes its title from La vallée des cloches, the last piece of the Ravel cycle.
Born in Osaka, Kodama entered the Paris Conservatoire at thirteen and later worked with Murray Perahia and András Schiff. She came to this programme with long experience of Messiaen, having already recorded Catalogue d'oiseaux and Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus for the Triton label. The album was recorded in September 2012 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stephan Schellmann as engineer. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich wrote the liner notes, which hear in Takemitsu's opening bars both Messiaen's crystalline chord progressions and the glittering sophistication of Ravel.
Kodama plays Miroirs with a clear touch and sparing pedal, shaping the form rather than losing herself in mood. The moths of Noctuelles flicker lightly, Oiseaux tristes moves at a slow, weighted pace, and even the virtuoso Alborada del gracioso keeps a certain poetic discretion. La fauvette des jardins, dedicated to Yvonne Loriod, is a half-hour portrait of the garden warbler and the landscape around Messiaen's summer home. Veiled chords evoke the call of the quail, and the colours of the lake change through the day. In the Takemitsu, careful pedalling leaves space around each sonority.
Christopher Dingle called it "a beautifully conceived programme" in BBC Music Magazine, noting how Takemitsu bridges Ravel's evocations and Messiaen's nature portrait. Joshua Kosman, in the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that the disc was worth hearing for Kodama's "crisp, pointed and sensuous playing" of Miroirs alone. Dominy Clements, in MusicWeb International in 2014, wrote that the recital surpassed all his expectations.
CD edition of ECM New Series 2343, first released on 25 October 2013, with Jungheinrich's essay in German and in J. Bradford Robinson's English translation.
