Recording Review
Akio Yashiro
Piano Concerto; Symphony
Hiromi Okada piano
Ulster Orchestra
Takuo Yuasa conductor
Naxos 8.555351
American Record Guide, July/August 2003
by Mark Lehman
I can't express what a pleasure it is to see Yashiro get the best possible treatment, as he does here. Pianist Hiromi Okada marries cut-glass precision to pyrotechnic dazzle, and the Ulster Orchestra under Takuo Yuasa plays with inspired abandon. (An Irish band doing Japanese music - amazing, isn't it? Truly we live in uno mondo.) To top everything off there's Naxos's ultra-vivid, high-impact sound, with Okada's piano captured in holographic immediacy and brilliance, the woodwinds wafting across the soundstage on plush cushions of air, the sonorous brass choirs intoning with bronze solemnity or snarling with bite, and those furious, thundering timpani pounding out of the speakers like maddened Cyclops. Fantastic music, wonderful playing, stunning sonics.
The Irish Times, Thursday 09 January 2003
by Michael Dervan
The Ulster Orchestra's latest disc is already a hit in Japan sitting at No.6 in the classical charts and outselling new releases by Simon Rattle and Valery Gergiev.
The Japanese composer Akio Yashiro (1929-76), who remains little-known in Europe, was a French-trained perfectionist, a pupil of Boulanger and Messiaen, who completed only a handful of concert works. The Symphony (1958) and Piano Concerto (1967) show high craftsmanship, fastidious instrumental colouring, and the extraordinary freedom with which Yashiro absorbed elements of Messiaen's writing. Other influences are also apparent (most notably, Bartók) in these confident, often appealingly outgoing works, which Takuo Yuasa conducts with invigorating spirit.
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