condition (record/cover): NM / EX+

The definitive double document of Toshiro Mayuzumi's two major symphonic works, recorded live by the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo - the Nirvāna-Symphony (1958) in February 1978, and the Mandala-Symphony (1960) in October 1976. Two works, two conductors, two dimensions of the same vast compositional project: the construction of a new musical language from the encounter between Western orchestral means and the deepest structures of Buddhist sound and thought.

If the Nirvāna-Symphony builds its world from the resonant physics of the temple bell and the ritual drone of male chant, the Mandala-Symphony extends the logic into the visual and cosmological: the mandala as acoustic architecture, the orchestra arranged and deployed as a three-dimensional representation of sacred space. Yūzō Toyama conducts the first pair of works; Kazuo Yamada the second. The NHK Symphony - Japan's premier orchestral ensemble, for whom Mayuzumi composed some of his most important early pieces - gives both works performances of authority and, one senses, of proprietary conviction. The insert includes liner notes in Japanese and English.

Taken together, the Nirvāna and Mandala symphonies constitute Mayuzumi's central creative achievement - the point at which his synthesis of East and West produced not a hybrid but an entirely new organism. Philips.