Birthday Celebrations

In the concerts I play the music I really love. I start the program with music by great Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa.

Hosokawa’s musical style is characterized by the almost unbearable sensitivity and simplicity in some cases. These qualities can be found in the background of efforts to achieve a balance with nature and the efforts to purify the mind. The above-mentioned Hosokawa characteristic driving force, or even struggle comes to mind specifically when recalling his comments in Helsinki in winter 2003, during an extremely cold winter day in his ridiculously dry air conditioned hotel room. My guitar cracked right after our meeting! Before the premiere of his new work, I wanted to hear composer’s advice on interpretation. At the end of my performance (Serenade for Guitar) Toshio looked at me with a special glance. Firstly he asked me to play less clean! “I want that to hear the moment of birth of the sound, resistance, friction, the energy a sound requires to get produced. A single tone can contain the whole world.” Hosokawa’s music does not work like a European “überlegen” constructs – the Cologne Cathedral or Bach’s counterpoint, but the miracle of spring, the emergence of a naturally occurring spirituality. As Hosokawa himself says: ” Music is the place where the notes and the silence encounter. ”
The composition I will perform is “Sakura” (cherry blossoms). It originates in the Edo period, c. 1600-1800. The melody was originally used as the koto playing exercise for children. It became a song during the later Meiji period, the end of the 1800s, when the text was added to the melody.