Fantasma/Cantos was commissioned by the BBC for the clarinettist Richard Stoltzman and the former BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra. It was premiered on 14 September 1991 at St. David’s Hall during the Cardiff Festival of Music. The performance was given by Stoltzman himself and the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Tadaaki Otaka CBE, the current conductor laureate of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Takemitsu had often drawn on the traditional Japanese garden as an inspiration in his later music as he developed an interest in the subject. Fantasma/Cantos is no exception. According to the composer, the structure of the work ‘is influenced by Japanese landscape gardens in the “go-round” style’, where ‘you walk along the path, stopping here and there to contemplate, and eventually find yourself back where you started from. Yet it is no longer the same starting point’.
The music is organised in a way that attempts to capture this experience. The clarinet solo and the orchestra are presented as separate layers, each of which acts according to their individual sense of time. By virtue of this setting, Takemitsu seeks to portray the stroller’s wander through the clarinet, while simultaneously depicting the changing garden landscape via different combinations of orchestral timbres. As we move along the garden scenery, however, the opening melodic fragments in the solo clarinet constantly reappears, creating a circular, purposeless motion that gradually distorts our teleological conception of time. This in effect results in alternating moments of wander and contemplation, and we are trapped in the tension between linear and non-linear time as we stroll around Takemitsu’s musical garden.
Concert notes originally commissioned for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Saturday 12 February 2022 (event cancelled).
© Kelvin H. F. Lee