Contemporary piano music by two leading Japanese composers: Keitaro Takahashi and Akira Nishimura, a fascinating journey of unheard sounds, harmonies, colours and timbres. • Keitaro Takahashi born 1986 in Tokyo, is a Japanese composer, media artist, and programmer. He currently is a research fellow at CeReNeM (Center for Research in New Music) at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. With his artistic background established both in Japan and Switzerland, his artistic interests as a composer mainly focus on creating musical gestures and acoustic associations under the concept of the morphology of sound textures and the mixture of various compositional techniques such as Heterophony, Micropolyphony, and Micro montage music. • Akira Nishimura was born in Osaka in 1953. He studied composition and music theory at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. While studying contemporary Western compositional techniques, he also developed a strong interest in traditional Asian music, religion, aesthetics, cosmology, etc. which led him to develop the concept of heterophony and other forms of music. His works won many prizes, among which the ExxonMobil Music Prize, Queen Elizabeth International Music Composition Competition and the Luigi Dallapiccola Composition Award. • Belgian pianist Lukas Huisman is one of the most remarkable and original pianists of his generation. From 2012 to 2016 he worked on an artistic doctoral project relating to contemporary complex solo piano music (Ferneyhough, Finnissy, Xenakis, Sorabji) at the School of Arts Ghent/University Ghent. He premièred Sorabji’s Symphonic Nocturne (PCLD0119) and recorded this monumental piece for solo piano on the Piano Classics label, for which he also recorded the piano music by Takemitsu (PCL10147), which was nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. He also recorded Michael Finnissy’s Gershwin Arrangements (PCL10218)
