Haiku Hands Haiku Hands

Inspired by Bartók’s’Mikrokosmos’ and by the indigenous music from various parts of Africa, South African composer Michael Blake created this magnum opus – like Bartók’s work, in varying degrees of difficulty for young players and experts alike. The recording was made in June 2021 at the Menuhin Hall, Cobham, Surrey by pianist Antony Gray, whose recent Divine Art albums of piano works by Saint-Saëns have met with great success and glowing reviews.

Inspired by Bartók’s’Mikrokosmos’ and by the indigenous music from various parts of Africa, South African composer Michael Blake created this magnum opus – like Bartók’s work, in varying degrees of difficulty for young players and experts alike. The recording was made in June 2021 at the Menuhin Hall, Cobham, Surrey by pianist Antony Gray, whose recent Divine Art albums of piano works by Saint-Saëns have met with great success and glowing reviews.

Born in Osaka, educated at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, Momo Kodama is well-placed to approach music from both Eastern and Western vantage points, as she does in this album which interweaves etudes of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955).

Born in Osaka, educated at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, Momo Kodama is well-placed to approach music from both Eastern and Western vantage points, as she does in this album which interweaves etudes of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955).

Born in 1953, Yoshihiro Kanno studied at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music and is currently a professor at Waseda University's Department of Intermedia Arts and Science. In his compositions he bases himself on three idioms: Western instrumental music, Japanese traditional instruments, and computer music. Combining these various elements freely, he creates scores for Japanese instruments and computer as well as for Western and Japanese instruments, such as the recent work Himiko – Memories of the Sun Goddess which fuses Western classical music and Japanese traditional music with Kabuki and Japanese classical dance. The pianist Noriko Ogawa, acclaimed for a wide-ranging discography comprising music by composers from Mozart and Debussy to Takemitsu and Graham Fitkin, is a champion of Kanno's music and has commissioned three of the works on the present disc, the so-called 'Particle of Piano' series. In each work, the pianist is required also to create sounds on a Japanese instrument, respectively a small iron wind chime, a pair of metal chopsticks made of the same steel as the fabled samurai swords, and a set of metal bells used in Kabuki performances. All three of these possess particular acoustical traits which affect how their sounds interact with that of the piano.