百花譜 Album of One Hundred Flowers Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – Tadao Sawai
This piece consists of linked parts representing the seasons. Spring, which begins with a profusion of flowers, is conveyed by a rivalry of competing sounds from the koto and the bass koto, aiming at dazzling colour before moving on to Summer. Both Summer and Winter were written with a particular scene in mind. In front of Sawai’s house there was an evergreen magnolia tree, from which heavy fleshy thick large white flowers would drift a languorous scent in the humid summer evenings. They reminded him of another summer unlike “this glaring one’’. The summer of this piece is that other summer. To sawai, the Japanese autumn is an especially musical and picturesque season. The sound of insects and the brocade of the coloured trees stir hearts; it is music, it is painting. He captures the typically Japanese beauty in his music.