Japanese composer Hisato Ohzawa spent almost as much of his active career outside of Japan as within; in the early '30s, Ohzawa studied in Boston with
Arnold Schoenberg and Roger Sessions and in Paris with
Nadia Boulanger and
Paul Dukas. So absorbed with Western modernism was Ohzawa that
Boulanger warned him to remember that he was Japanese. And indeed, one will find very little that is recognizably Japanese in Naxos' album Ohzawa: Piano Concerto No. 2, which features pianist
Ekaterina Saranceva with the
Russian Philharmonic Orchestra under
Dmitry Yablonsky; Ohzawa's Symphony No. 2 is also included. Both of these works were written in Paris in 1934-1935 and first heard there in concerts in part sponsored by the Japanese consulate. Neither of these compositions is very impressive; the first movement of the concerto vaguely resembles
Stravinsky's Concerto for piano and winds, except that it is lacking in concision and is in desperate want of a contrasting theme. When the movement ends, it simply drops off the face of the earth; while it isn't unusual to bring the first movement of a concerto to a cold ending, you would want to leave the listener in a condition where he/she will anticipate the movement that follows, a requirement Ohzawa does not meet. The second movement is described in the notes as "Japanist" in part, but if so, careful concentration doesn't reveal it. The symphony has similar, though different, problems of form, both in sustaining ideas and provision of variety. In the opening movement, long solo passages for the woodwind are interrupted with heavily scored exclamations from the orchestra. While the form of the symphony is laid out as "Aria-Toccata-Aria-Toccata-Capriccio," Ohzawa's rhythmic approach is so similar sounding from one movement to the next that it's difficult to tell the difference between them. Some token Japanisms are faintly detectible in the second toccata; but Ohzawa's overall progression of ideas is so hazy and discursive as to make a late Havergal Brian symphony sound like
Brahms' Third.
Recording and performance are fine here, though the music is of such middling quality that it hardly matters. One comes away with the notion that Ohzawa must have been a rich kid who was able to parlay his share of the family fortune, in combination with institutional support, into the pursuit of a career as a composer. That in itself is not a bad thing; look at Hans Krása, for example. However, what survives of Krása's scant amount of work is substantive, whereas these pieces are not, nor are they particularly memorable or interesting even as guilty pleasures. It should be said, though, that Ohzawa made some real strides in terms of being the first Japanese classical composer to reach out to foreign lands, and some of his achievements at home, too, are notable. As Naxos is offering a different disc of Ohzawa, perhaps that one is a better example of his gifts; this one is merely puzzling and unrewarding.