Well-Rounded Sounds of Toru Takemitsu

We try to understand Toru Takemitsu. He swam “in an ocean that has no West and no East,” he wrote in a postcard that pianist Peter Serkin received two days after the Japanese composer died in February of last year. But he bridged not only West and East, he bridged art and popular culture. He bridged the avant-garde and romanticism. He bridged the ethereal and the concrete, the sublime and the quotidian.

Takemitsu wrote music for some of the greatest art films ever made, and for some pretty trashy ones. He wrote concert works of extraordinary sensitivity to sound, probing its deepest mysteries. And he wrote loopy pop tunes. Everyone--absolutely everyone--who met him, adored him.

We’ve just had a week of Takemitsu. Oliver Knussen conducted his music last week with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its New Music Group. And by coincidence--or synergy--the Concordia Orchestra offered a tribute to Takemitsu Monday night at Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

And the more one hears of this composer--and the more stories that are told of him, the more people who come forth to speak of his effect on their lives--the more incredible it all seems. “To me, the world is sound,” he explained. “Sound penetrates me, linking me to the world.”

The program Monday, conducted by Masatoshi Mitsumoto, was well-rounded, offering about as many sides of Takemitsu as could be presented in an evening. Which means that it still left out a lot. The program booklet printed column upon column of titles. It included dozens of Japanese films we’ve never seen (he scored more than 90) such as “Hymn to a Tired Man” and the classics like “Woman in the Dunes.” It included, of course, the many extraordinary titles of concert works, such as “Far Calls Coming Far” or “From me flows what You call Time.”

What flowed from Concordia were tributes to Takemitsu from the celebrated film composer David Raksin (a spoken introduction) and Lukas Foss (a short memorial piece, “For Toru,” written for solo flute and string orchestra) and four major Takemitsu scores performed for the first time in Southern California.

The range of the music alone was nearly unfathomable. The earliest piece on the program, one of Takemitsu’s most famous, “November Steps,” is a profound combining of traditional Japanese instruments, the biwa (a lute-like instrument) and the shakuhachi (a thick wooden flute) with the Western orchestra. The striking combinations in this 1967 piece is not of cultures (biwa and shakuhachi, themselves, represent different traditions) but of sounds, and the piece is stranger to the eye (the visiting soloists wore their formal Japanese dress) than it is to the ear.

“Star/Isle,” an orchestra piece from 1982, is pure sound in bursts of celestial fireworks. “Three Films Scores,” an arrangement for string orchestra, of music from two films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (moody urban jazz from the 1959 boxing documentary “Jose Torres” and a smooth but slightly askew waltz from the 1966 “Face of Another”) and Shohei Imamura (the somber chromaticism of the 1989 “Black Rain”).

The concert concluded with a fantasy, “Family Tree,” for narrator (television and film actress Tamlyn Tomita) and orchestra. The text by Shuntara Tanikawa looks at childhood wonder with cold eyes, but the music warms it up with the sweetest of melodies that never quite get fully realized until the end. Here, perhaps, is the essence of Takemitsu. The realization of melody--replete with corny accordion--is not culmination, not climax, not fulfillment. It comes too late--at the end of childhood, as memory--for that. Time is always flowing in Takemitsu, and his message is to flow with it, not try to stand outside of it.

Concordia is an orchestra with good freelance players. There were capable soloists, including Lawrence Kaplan (flute), Yukio Tanaka (biwa) and Kifu Mitsuhashi (shakuhachi); Mitsumoto conducted with evident affection and eagerness. This, though, is subtle and elusive music, and we were spoiled the past week by Knussen and Serkin, and their abilities to sense the way sound breathes. That is found in only a handful of performers, although another marvel of Takemitsu’s music is its generous spirit, and that was not lost on Monday’s audience.