Echoes of Antiquity, With Avant-Garde Influences

by Steve Smith
For “Winds and Strings of Change,” a concert mixing indigenous Japanese hogaku pieces and contemporary works for traditional instruments on Thursday evening, the Miller Theater at Columbia University was either half full or half empty, according to your philosophical bent. The program was part of JapanNYC, a major festival that Carnegie Hall is presenting in its own auditoriums and in spaces around the city.

Granted, a 6 o’clock starting time probably inconvenienced many who might have attended. Still, the concert was free. A pessimist would want to have seen fewer empty seats at this, one of a handful of JapanNYC events to deviate from the Western classical tradition.

Then again, an optimist would have taken heart that a receptive audience assembled for an event meant to honor the composer Toru Takemitsu, a pioneer in bridging Japanese and Western art-music cultures, and to promote Columbia’s recently established Gagaku-Hogaku Classical Japanese Music Curriculum and Performance Program.

Two of the performers, Yukio Tanaka on biwa (Japanese lute), and Kifu Mitsuhashi on shakuhachi (bamboo flute), had played in Takemitsu’s “November Steps” with the Saito Kinen Orchestra at Carnegie Hall the night before. Mr. Tanaka and Mr. Mitsuhashi, I was informed by a New York-based Japanese pianist in the audience, are viewed as national treasures in Japan. Joined here by the Japanese koto player Yoko Nishi and the New York shakuhachi player James Nyoraku Schlefer, they gave masterly performances.

Ms. Nishi opened the concert with “Midare” (“Disarray”), a shimmering, free-floating piece by Kengyo Yatsuhashi, a 17th-century master of the shamisen (lute) and koto. Mr. Mitsuhashi followed with the anonymous “Tsuru no Sugomori” (“Nesting Cranes”), his sound gusty, pliant and serene.

Complete on  >>  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/arts/music/18winds.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss