Artist Diary 3
Whenever I have made a gramophone record / CD, I've always had the same reaction on seeing the finished copy in all its glory: that, somehow, I can't quite believe it's actually happened and that there it is, preserved in some shape or form (if not for all time, then at least for quite some time into the future). I happen to be very proud indeed of my latest one, which comes out on GMN on January the 26th, and is of the complete piano music of Toru Takemitsu. This was something I had been wanting to do for a long time. Indeed, it was first talked about in Takemitsu's lifetime, and he was so excited about the idea that he was going to write me a new piece especially for it. That he should have died so suddenly and so unexpectedly, was a terrible shock to me (not only because of this, but because he was a great personal friend over many years and considerably championed my work). As a special tribute to him, I've made a paraphrase of one of his orchestral pieces especially for this CD and called it "A Vision of Takemitsu". The one thing that would have made the release of this CD absolutely perfect, would have been if Toru had been able to hear it himself. Alas, not to be! I do miss him terribly. In fact, I wish that he had been alive to see just how much his music has taken off since his death, unlike what so often happens to composers just after they die, when there seems to be a falling off of interest in their work. interest in Takemitsu's music has just gone sky-high in the last few years. The last record of Takemitsu's music on which I appeared playing "Quotation of Dream" (a piece for two pianos and orchestra), which he wrote for and dedicated to me and Peter Serkin, not only won the Gramophone award for best contemporary music record in 1999, but, I heard quite recently, has already sold more than 20,000 copies, which is an enormous figure for a classical CD, not just of contemporary music, but of any kind of repertoire. I think the reason for this surge in popularity is that, though his music was known and greatly admired by the profession, and, for many years he had no shortage of commissions (many of the greatest orchestras and artists of the world), it just took its time to work through into the popular consciousness, just needing a certain accumulation of fine performances. It is a very special kind of music indeed. Although it occasionally reminds one of other composers, I am thinking in particular of Debussy and Messiaen, it isn't like thier music at all. The one thing it particularly does, and it's possibly the main diffculty for us Westerners performing it, is that it 'breathes' differently. It avoids any kind of familiar metrical and rhythmic division and phrase structure which we are so familiar with in the West and it actually took him many years to work out how best to notate this kind of 'breathing' in his music. He wrote piano music throughout his entire career, in fact, my CD contains the first recording of his first ever musical composition which was discovered in his papers after his death, and of which I have made an edition (now published) for Schott Japan. The piece is quite a surprise, because one reads about Takemitsu that when he was young, just after the war, he hated all things Japanese, and yet, nothing could sound more Japanese than this piece. The interesting thing about the piano music, is how distinctive and distinguished it is - right from the start he seems to have found himself in his writing for piano. I've actually arranged the order of the pieces on the CD to reflect the great diversity to be found in the piano music. One can listen to it straight through, although this is not my recommended way of listening to Takemitsu (and it wouldn't have been his either).
© Paul Crossley 2026