TOSHIO HOSOKAWA (b.1955): Nachtmusik for Solo Cimbalom, for Ensemble: Drawing, Im Frühlingsgarten, Singing Garden, Voyage V.

Description: Like many of Hosokawa's works these all have a connection to nature, more or less overtly, and his personal style of abstract neo-Impressionism is the ideal medium in which to paint these organic but ordered naturescapes. Drawing is a dreamlike abstract flow of shape and texture, like the single stroke of a calligrapher's brush or the opening and closing of a flower. The composer tells us that it also functions as a metaphor for birth; the slow waiting, the traumatic event and the new experience of light and color. Im Frühlingsgarten sounds exactly as the title implies; a warm, dreamy landscape pranked with blotches of color and punctuated by birdcalls and the hum of insects. Nachtmusic creates gleams and shafts of iridescent sounds from the sharp attack and long, complex decay of groups or sequences of notes on the cimbalom. Singing Garden is a beautiful companion work to Im Frühlingsgarten, written the following year. Washes of consonant chords are the background to organic motifs that germinate and grow, drawn with the greatest subtlety and delicacy of line. In the fifth work in the Voyage series, the soloist represents a human being, and the ensemble the teeming world of nature, singing and responding to each other and gradually drawing together in harmony.Ukho Ensemble Kyiv; Luigi Gaggero (cimbalom).