专辑简介

Somei Satoh composed ‘Litania’ in 1973, but no recorded rendition appears to have been release until this album, performed by Margaret Leng Ten on two pianos with tape delay. The liner notes on the record somewhat aptly compare the piece to Krzysztof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima’. The listener is slowly exposed to increasingly atonal waves of chords and overlapping tremolos (of tone on the microscale, of amplitude across the span of the composition). The piece is strongly informed by the apprehensive Expressionism which gripped post-war Japan, though Satoh’s inclusion of melodic intervals (in a break from Penderecki’s ‘Threnody…’) perhaps speaks to the continuing attachment of new music to classical Japanese forms.