Akio Yashiro

* Piano Concerto (1962)
* Symphony (1958)

Hirmoi Okada, piano; Ulster Orchestra/Takuo Yuasa
Naxos 8.555351  {DDD} TT: 59:34

Summary for the Busy Executive: Sushi and goulash.

Akio Yashiro (1929-1976) stands with Mayuzumi and Takemitsu as the
leading proponents of musical Modernism in Japan.  To some extent,
Mayuzumi and Takemitsu aimed at an integration of Western technique and
Japanese "soul." Yashiro, deeply influenced by hard moderns like Bartok,
Messiaen, and perhaps even Jolivet, did his best to reproduce their kind
of music, and I myself find very little evidence of Japanese culture,
other than the drive to Westernization, in his work.  These pieces could
have come from Paris, Budapest, Rio de Janeiro, or New York.  This says
nothing about their quality, only that their national origin is largely
beside the point.

The workmanship astonishes me.  One has only to listen to the piano
concerto's opening to realize that Yashiro plays Bartok's game at Bartok's
level.  That is, he builds an exciting first movement over a long span
based on two tiny ideas (so small, you can't really call them themes)
and makes powerful music besides.  The concerto is one of those pieces
that grabs the listener in the opening bars and never lets go.  One hears
echoes of Bartok's first concerto in Yashiro's, but it's more a matter
of mood than appropriation.  The second movement opens with a master
stroke.  The soloist plays a C in an irregularly rhythmic ostinato for
quite a long time, as the orchestra laments.  The ostinato then switches
to the orchestra as the piano takes up the lament.  The ostinato is
seldom absent from the movement, and it climaxes on the timpani and then
on the piano in octaves.  Yashiro courts the obvious danger of boring
overstatement but manages not just to fend it off, but to build almost
fevered tension and let it off with grace.  The finale, a rhythmic orgy,
reminds me a bit of the last movement of Ginastera's first concerto,
also influenced by Bartok and written in the previous year.  I strongly
doubt that Yashiro directly lifted anything.  They simply share a Bartokian
world.  The concerto comes to a fiery end, and I can't of anyone actually
sitting still throughout its length.

The four-movement Symphony, written in the composer's late twenties, has
the craft but not the assurance or the laser-like focus of the concerto
from just four years on.  It comes down to a lackluster first movement.
One hears many of the same devices in the symphony as in the concerto,
but to less effect.  For example, the symphony's opening movement uses
an ostinato against an "orchestral singing" -- similar to the concerto's
second movement.  However, neither the ostinato nor the singing involves
you as in the later work.  Indeed, the symphony picks up only at the
eruption of the manic second-movement scherzo (based on the first-movement
ostinato, incidentally).  Obviously, Yashiro keeps a tight rein over the
motific argument, and the argument crosses movements.  The liner notes,
by Morihide Katayama, are extremely helpful here.  What's missing from
the first movement is a reason to care.  The third-movement Lento,
however, is downright gorgeous, with sumptuously voiced strings and
brass, as well as lean bits for contrast.  This is probably my favorite
track on the disc.  The Bartok allusions haven't the usual prominence,
and one hears a vigorously individual poetry as well as great craft.
The finale takes the "brood-and-explode" strategy of Bartok's Music for
Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.  I'd expect too much to ask for the
power of that masterpiece, but Yashiro still manages to generate a lot
of heat in individual episodes.  I miss, however, a continuous drive in
the material.  Too often the music winds down and then restarts.  Still,
I'm judging Yashiro by the standard he himself has set.  This symphony
would grace many a catalogue.

Okada plays like a master in the Bartokian concerto, bringing to mind
such eminences as Sandor, Fischer, and Nadas.  Under Yuasa, the Ulster
Orchestra sounds crisp and powerful without over-inflation, without the
Guy-Lombardo-like sweetness one usually got from Bryden Thomson.  The
most I can say for them is that they make me want to hear more Yashiro.
Overall, a winner of a CD.

Steve Schwartz