Takemitsu: Quotation of Dream

CML call number: CD CLASSICAL Takemitsu
Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker: "Takemitsu died in 1996, at the age of sixty-five. He was by far the most celebrated of Japanese composers. … Carnegie Hall has presented several Takemitsu performances this season. … Recordings have multiplied into the dozens, on such labels as DG, BIS, and Naxos. Film connoisseurs cherish Takemitsu’s scores for various masterpieces of postwar Japanese cinema. … [C]onvincing performances of Takemitsu … are easily found on recordings. … Perhaps the best of the bunch is Oliver Knussen’s DG disk 'Quotation of Dream,' which brings together several masterpieces of Takemitsu’s final decade; in the title work, a fragment of Debussy’s 'La Mer' surges to the surface of the music, making explicit the composer’s most profound and productive stylistic debt. Listening again, I realized that it is hard to say much about this music other than that it is uncommonly beautiful. Its processes remain mysterious, despite the best efforts of analysts and explicators. It almost shies away from the listener as it transpires, longing to return to the silence whence it came" ("Toward Silence," 2/5/07).