Ukho Ensemble Kyiv - Gardens (2019)

Toshio Hosokawa, Japan’s pre-eminent living composer, creates his distinctive musical language from the fascinating relationship between Western avant-garde art and traditional Japanese culture. With this poetic album, the Ukho Ensemble Kyiv presents recordings that depict the sound of nature and illustrate Hosokawa’s love for the garden. The grandson of an Ikebana master, he has a special relationship with flowers and once described composition as “a flower of sound that blossoms from silence: music as calligraphy of sounds, painted on the canvas of silence”. The composer writes: “I am searching for a new form of Japanese spiritual culture and music, one through which I can remain true to myself as well as to my origins. We need to examine the Western world again, more carefully, in order to see ourselves objectively and to truly get to know ourselves.”