In offering us the fruits of his Japanese culture, Toshio Hosokawa teaches us to slightly adjust our musical ear. The notion of the show and of the luxurious images that we normally enjoy are suspended for the benefit of a sensitive listening that is akin to a sense of touch. The ‘tactile’ enters the music in the form of breaths, of long ductile and subtly ornamented notes and the precious resonances of the harp.

Bird Fragments, for example, was written while thinking of the blind children the composer had met, expressing in clay the “sensations of birds” that certain poems had evoked for them. Naomi Sato, a specialist of the Japanese mouth organ (the Shô), will be joining us for this very subtle concert on an instrument that attracted the interest of John Cage – certainly the most Japanese of Western composers.