condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Two composers, two entirely different answers to the question of what Japanese orchestral music might become in the mid-1960s - paired here on a Philips LP that deserves far wider recognition. Teizo Matsumura (1929-2007) came to composition by an unusual route: orphaned early, surviving tuberculosis in his twenties, he began writing music and haiku simultaneously during his long convalescence, emerging with a voice that bore the marks of that austere formation. His teachers - Tomojiro Ikenouchi and Akira Ifukube - gave him deep roots in both Western counterpoint and Japanese musical thinking, but from early on he refused the dodecaphonic orthodoxy that dominated his generation, pursuing instead an independent path in which the modal inheritance of Asia was pressed into dialogue with the post-Romantic orchestral tradition. The Symphony No. 1 (1965), performed here and recognized at the 1974 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, is the fullest expression of that synthesis he had yet achieved.

Michio Mamiya (1929-2024) brought an entirely different temperament to the same problem. A student of Ikenouchi at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, Mamiya was drawn toward the application of twelve-tone technique to traditional Japanese timbres - koto, shamisen, the tonal world of Japanese folk music subjected to serial procedure with a directness that neither domesticated the technique nor erased the material. His Deux Tableaux pour Orchestre '65, which won the Otaka Prize in 1965, is a work of considerable force: coloristically bold, rhythmically inventive, and carrying in its title the sense of two paintings that refuse to be a diptych.

A compelling document of a generation finding its footing, with real consequence. Philips.