Glebe Town Hall, November 7
Here was a concert to eliminate perceptions of the koto being an inherently limited instrument. The models ranged from five strings to the conventional 13 strings and the 17-string bass koto, the ensemble sizes extended from one to 16 and the compositions dated from 1630 to now.
The Koto Music Institute of Australia’s special guest was the Japanese virtuoso, teacher and pioneer, Kazue Sawai, whose beautiful touch, spirited sense of drama and remarkable dynamic range were heard in extremely diverse contexts. The traditional Kurodabushi, where she played conventional koto in dialogue with Sandy Evans’ soprano saxophone against an 11-koto ensemble, contrasted with Yoichi Sugiyama’s Tawayame for 5-string koto, a solo piece on an instrument replicating a design that is over 2,000 old. Although the work was almost ruthlessly Spartan, the sound was so soft that it was like listening to occasional feathers of sound floating to earth.
On Tony Gorman’s humorous, evocative Whistling at Dinner Sawai became a radical sound sculptress, playing bass koto in conjunction with Evans’ tenor saxophone and Australia’s leading koto exponent, Satsuki Odamura, against a three-koto ensemble. Finally she shared soloing duties with Odamura on an ambitious work for 16 kotos – an impressive sight, indeed! – by Tadao Sawai.
Among the pieces without Sawai were two engaging world premieres by composition students at Sydney Conservatorium: Joshua McNulty’s Sailing the Grey Waves and Mimi Kind’s Gumnuts, both for four kotos. McNulty’s harmonically adventurous piece exposed a slight lack of rhythmic cohesion among the players, while Kind’s ranged from using wine glasses as slides to highlighting the instrument’s harp-like qualities.
Linsey Pollak’s Pretang and Tang featured the fluent improvising rapport between Odamura (bass koto) and Evans (soprano), and a particular pleasure was Yatsuhashi Kengyou’s Midare (circa 1630), played by Masayo Kasai and Kayoko Morii. The piece’s sparseness and formality afforded the best opportunity to relish the teardrop-shaped attack and decay of the koto’s notes and the nuanced bending techniques as the sounds faded to a somehow intensified silence.