Point and line

Description

Born in Osaka and having studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, Momo Kodama is well placed to approach music from both Western and Eastern perspectives, as she does on this album, on which études by Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Toshio Hosokawa (born in 1955) are interwoven. Each of these two composers transcended his own boundaries. Debussy, turning toward the music of the future, drew his inspiration from the East. Hosokawa, for his part, combined aspects of Japanese and European traditions in his contemporary compositions. Momo Kodama explains: "in the music of Toshio Hosokawa, I find elements close to Debussy: the freedom of form and tonal color, the sense of poetic conception, with a wide range of lyricism and dynamics, between meditation and virtuosic development, between light and shadow, between grand gestures and minimalist refinement". Point and Line is the pianist's second album on ECM. It follows her previous release La Vallée des cloches, widely acclaimed by critics, featuring works by Ravel, Takemitsu and Messiaen.