Album Riverrun - Water-Ways by Toru Takemitsu Review
The primary soloist is this collection of 4 beautious and elegant works is the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman with the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and several chamber players. The featured world-premiere recording is "Fantasma/Cantos", a single movement concerto for clarinet and orchestra composed in 1991. Exquisite, lush, impressionistic chords for full orchestra depicting the richness of a Japanese landscape garden open the work. The clarinet sound, as a character, is truly awed by the beauty encountered in this setting. The mood changes to an equally rich but more sombre mode with the clarinet playing simple rising melodic modes and arpeggios in fourths against a sustained background. This solo line continuously "undergoes metamorphosis" (Takemitsu) in relation to the scene, depicted by the orchestra, in which it finds itself. Mysterious percussion is introduced, the orchestra joins on one building unison (a la Berg's famous Interlude in "Wozzeck") and then breaks out from this into a full Debussy-ian chord and texture. The clarinet rhapsodizes with birdcall-like patterns, then falls into lyrical melodies inflected with jazz-like bend notes; many other small bendings and modern playing techniques are sparingly used in these extended passages. A melodious, quasi-improvisatory clarinet solo section is reached without any break in the texture, and the orchestra is subtly re-introduced (satisfying both traditional concerti form as well as maintaining the lovely impressionistic texture of the work). From this mid-point solo, the music seems to retrograde, not backwards along the same path but looking at a previously viewed scene across a pond. "The structure of the work is influenced by Japanese landscape gardens in the go-round style. You walk along the path, stopping here and there to contemplate, and eventually find yourself back where you started from. Yet it is no longer the same starting point" (Takemitsu).Review by allmusic.com
