2018New Japanese Music at the Freer Gallery日本乐器展

pianist Kathryn Woodard has made a specialty of pushing music across cultural borders -- she was the first to play John Cage in darkest Kyrgyzstan, for instance. On Thursday night, she brought that intrepid spirit to the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium, teaming up with the redoubtable koto player Masayo Ishigure and three other musicians to plumb the deep, shimmering currents of 20th-century Japanese music.

Masayo Ishigure
Contemporary Japanese composers have, for better or worse, been profoundly influenced by their European counterparts over the past hundred years, and the program opened a fascinating window on this rather one-sided fertilization.

Sometimes the results were harmless; Michio Miyagi's 1929 work, "The Sea in Spring" for koto and violin was a pretty, impressionistic work, distinctively Japanese both in musical language and overall contemplating-nature-by-moonlight esthetic approach. Other pieces, though, just seemed awkward; Kosaku Yamada's 1914 "Seven Poems" was a dutiful hodgepodge of borrowed styles (Scriabin, notably) picked up from his studies in Europe. And Maki Ishii's aggressively brainy "A Time of Afterglow" from 1983 was difficult to warm to (he studied serialism in Berlin in the 1960s, poor guy) despite a virtuosic and attentive performance by Ishigure with Theresa Salomon on violin.

But several works were nothing short of stunning. Salomon's violin swooped and circled over a measured piano line in Somei Satoh's mesmerizing "Birds in Warped Time II" from 1980, building an immense, cathedral-like effect from minimal gestures. Cellist James Wilson turned in a terrific account of Toshiro Mayuzumi's 1983 "Bunraku," a colorful, imaginative soliloquy streaked through with strange wit. But the most accomplished work of the evening was without doubt Toru Takemitsu's "Between Tides." It's as compelling and unfathomable as a dream, and the players brought it off with a perfect feel for its dark, elusive poetry.

2018日本东京国际乐器展
Musical Instruments Fair Japan 2018 
展会时间：2018年10月19-21日
展馆地点：东京国际展示中心
主办单位：日本乐器行业协会
后援单位：音乐文化创造单位，音乐电子事业协会，全日本吹奏乐联盟
中国组展组团：上海福贸展览服务有限公司
参展参观热线：张鹏15-821106-898微信  Q995-81873