Takuro Okada – Konoma

Paul Klee’s picture Ad marginem provides inspiration and context for the present programme and is a visual guide to performance for us as Talistrio: a radiant red circle in the middle, while around it - driven back to the margin - living creatures and abstract objects emerge. It is surely this mixture of melancholy and hope that links all the works listed below, be it Casella’s neoclassical dance on the volcano from the early 20th century, Tchaikovsky’s death and its shattering inspirational impulse upon the young Rachmaninoff, or the Japanese child scene at sunset.

GLAY leader/guitarist TAKURO embarks on a Journey without a map in his highly anticipated first solo project! Armed with his three vintage Les Paul guitars, TAKURO teamed with producer Tak Matsumoto and Los Angeles-based musicians to record his ambitious first solo instrumental album.

This is the romantic story of a three-way love-affair told to us in music. We know that the young Brahms, as beautiful as a star, made a very noticed irruption within the couple Schumann. "Arrival of Brahms, a genius! Notes Robert in his diary with an extraordinary intuition. The sequel is told by Shuichi Okada on violin and Clément Lefebvre on piano, two young musicians of the National Conservatory of Music of Paris, co-producer of the present, where they deftly weave the links between the three characters. Schumann's First Sonata in A minor, Op. 105, opens fire, followed by two excerpts from the famous Sonata F-A-E, composed by Schumann, Brahms and Dietrich, the latter unfortunately being systematically left out by the violinists. Caught in the vice between the two men who love him, here is Clara with his Three Romances, Op. 22 which precedes the very melancholy Sonata No. 1, Op. 78, "Regen-Sonate" by Brahms. The music gathered here speaks better than words of how the three composers respond to one another and become a kind of common language, that of the impulses of the heart, of the outpouring of feelings and the unspoken.

Unlike the best-of compilations in the past, this CD contains songs that are first-time-to-CD, and many other hits.

"Life is but an Empty Dream" is the seventh full length from long-form ambient composer Okada. By pressing play, Gregory Pappas, the man behind the moniker, requires your full attention. Waves of crashing sound swirl around viscus beats and cavernous staccato piano. Sound becomes broken to be reconstructed many times over. This is not the lovesick nor heartbroken Okada we've witnessed before. This is a cathartic, disillusioned, Okada, out the other side, worse for wear but building anew. The proximal six-minute opening to the album expounds destruction and disintegration, chaos and rebirth…