Music Reviews : Tokyo Ensemble Opens 1990 CalArts Festival

The Tokyo International Music Ensemble is an ad hoc group created for its current tour, but Toshi Ichiyanagi and his band of versatile virtuosos would be most welcome as a regular association. Their “New Tradition” program of gendai hogaku that opened the 1990 Contemporary Music Festival at CalArts Friday was a revelation.

Perhaps the most startling thing about this set of contemporary pieces for traditional Japanese gagaku instruments was the complete freedom from trivializing stereotypes. The instruments and their performance practices were honored, but within a reconceived context.

The results were at once conceptually familiar and sonically fresh. Ichiyanagi’s “Michi” (The Way) employed almost the entire ensemble of woodwinds, plucked strings and percussion in a large, formally rounded work that merged ceremonial solidity with emotional abstraction.

At the climax of the piece, dancer Yoshiko Suzuki became the eye of the storm, a balanced, ultimately overwhelmed center of poise amid musical mayhem. The mixture of instruments with traditional dance and mime was unorthodox, expressively vehement and sonically kaleidoscopic.

One of the distinctive elements of gagaku music is the piercing harmonic clusters of the shoh , a type of mouth organ. This instrument gave an exotic background flair to most of the pieces on the program, but took a central role in Toshio Hosokawa’s “Utsuroi” (Transition).

Mayumi Miyata made the musical form physical, circling with her shoh around harpist Ayako Shinozaki. The combination of the sustained tension from the shoh and the plangent agitations from the harp--both delivered with controlled bravura--proved a gripping ritual.

Toru Takemitsu’s “Distance” is a more conventionally patterned duo for oboe and shoh, fluently played by veteran avant-gardist James Ostryniec and Miyata.

The other work for large ensemble on the program was Yoshiro Kanno’s “Festival of Stone Mirror II.” It offered brilliant opportunities for koto player Kazue Sawai in a flamboyant soundscape ordered by regular metric groupings.

In some ways, the woodwind ensemble “Hiten-seido I” by Maki Ishii is a soaring, quasi-countrapuntal reflection of John Cage’s placidly mournful “Ryoanji.” As usual, the presentation was communicative and as attentive to the total sight-sound performance environment as possible in the user-hostile Main Gallery.