Akio Yashiro - Symphony (1958)

Symphony (1958) I. Prelude: Adagio - Moderato [0:00] II. Scherzo: Vivace [7:22] III. Lento [11:13] IV. Adagio - Allegro energico [23:54] A large-scale orchestral work by Japanese composer Akio Yashiro (1929-1976), a student of Saburo Moroi and Qunihico Hashimoto. Although he was solidly situated in the Japanese modernist school of composers, Yashiro was highly skeptical of avant-garde trends in music and grounded his music in somewhat more traditional forms, drawing inspiration from figures such as Beethoven, Dukas and Messiaen. When John Cage visited Japan in 1962, Yashiro repeatedly heckled his performance, saying, "This is no music!" He had earned high praise from Messiaen and Florent Schmitt as a student at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, and he became widely recognized as one of the leading Japanese composers. However, Yashiro's perfectionism hindered his productivity over the course of his career, so that his oeuvre remained quite small. The 1958 Symphony was commissioned by the Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. It consists of four nearly-continuous movements, which are carefully united by a few motifs, most notably a three note B-F-F sharp pattern and the B-F or B flat-F intervals. Some of the first-movement material was taken from an unfinished work that Yashiro began composing as a student on the subject of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Conductor: Takuo Yuasa Ulster Orchestra