Takemitsu, Still Transcendent

Six years after his death, Toru Takemitsu, a man who stood less than 5 feet tall, is seen as a giant in 20th century music, the first composer to significantly bridge East and West. Yet what is most wonderful about Takemitsu is not the bridges he built, important as they are, but something even finer. He didn’t so much cross cultures as transcend them.

For instance, in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s tribute to Takemitsu on Wednesday night at Royce Hall, in a concert sponsored by UCLA, there was little of his work that sounded specifically Japanese and much that sounded on the surface like Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen. But at no time would a listener have mistaken Takemitsu’s music for anything other than Japanese. Takemitsu was, in fact, the inspiring artist who could have a powerful, unmistakable cultural identity and yet move beyond it.

The Philharmonic roster was appropriately international. The conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, is Finnish. The soloist, Paul Crossley, is a British pianist with a flair for French Impressionism. Both were friends of Takemitsu and have long been champions of his music.

The program was international as well in its attempts to show Takemitsu’s range. It included two late works: “riverrun,” a short piano concerto that was commissioned by the Philharmonic in 1984, and “Twill by Twilight,” a piece written in memory of Morton Feldman (who died in 1987) that demonstrates Takemitsu’s connection with the New York School of American experimental composers. There were also pieces by Oliver Knussen, the British composer and Takemitsu champion, and Messiaen.

And there were examples of Takemitsu’s film scores. He was a fan who claimed to attend more movies--around 300 a year--than anyone else in Japan. As a sidelight to his career as a composer of concert music, he somehow found time to compose the music for 93 films, some of them (including “Woman in the Dunes” and “Ran”) among the classics of Japanese cinema.

As one example of Takemitsu’s astonishing range of interests, I recall a late night at Tanglewood when the composer, flushed by a few beers, described in halting English how he liked to begin his composing day by badly banging through Bach’s entire “St. Matthew Passion” on the piano. He then went on to discuss in detail aspects of LaMonte Young’s arcane five-hour Minimalist masterpiece, “The Well-Tuned Piano,” followed by equally detailed plot descriptions of a couple of the most obscure “Godzilla” movies.

The topics might just as easily have been Zen rock gardens, James Joyce (“riverrun” begins the first sentence of “Finnegans Wake”), French Surrealism, Messiaen or the Beatles.

The lush, enveloping sound world of the two late, riveting Takemitsu works--”riverrun” and “Twill by Twilight”--is French. But chords and textures derived from, say, Debussy, take on a life of their own. They become like waves in the ocean, with a sense of ever becoming, a potential that begins over and over again but is never predictable. This music seems to hold in it the ever-encouraging sense of possibility while still acknowledging the grim realities of life.

Crossley’s playing in “riverrun” was immaculate, although the orchestra’s performance in it and in “Twill by Twilight” was not as truly oceanic as it might have been. Salonen, however, conducted a brilliant reading of Knussen’s complexly celebratory, sonically bursting “Flourish With Fireworks.” And he led as close to a perfect performance of Messiaen’s “Une Sourire”--with its softly clinging harmonic passages interrupted by the cheer of birdsong--as could be imagined.

The ideal addition to the program would have been John Adams’ “Eros Piano,” for piano and orchestra, which was written for Crossley. It is both a gloss on “riverrun” and a memorial to Feldman. But there was the compensation of Crossley’s gleaming performances of two short Takemitsu works for solo piano, “Rain Tree Sketch II” and “Les Yeux Clos I.”And an interesting experiment was attempted with “Three Film Scores,” a suite Takemitsu made from his music to “Jose Torres” (Hiroshi Teshigahara’s gritty New York documentary on the boxer), “Black Rain” (Shohei Imamura’s devastating story of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima) and “The Face of Another” (Teshigahara’s weird look at changed identities). Clips from the films were shown along with the music, but they were not synchronized because Takemitsu made changes in the original cues for the suite. It worked surprisingly well, even when an off-kilter waltz tune meant for a seedy nightclub in “Face of Another” was transferred to a scene in the which the protagonist privately examines his new face in the mirror.

But maybe that is not so surprising after all. Whatever its stylistic face, whatever it mirrors, whatever culture it finds itself in, Takemitsu’s music has something essential to say.