Difficult Surroundings for Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu, the important Japanese composer who died last year, loved gardens. He loved them as physical spaces but he also loved them as symbols for the quiet harmony they imply between man and nature. They do not, he would say in his characteristically elliptical way, reject people.

It sometimes helps to think about gardens when listening to Takemitsu’s music, since it moves with no particular goal, but rather allows the listener to enter into a privileged acoustic space and behold wonders. And what luck that the Asia America Symphony could close its 38th season Sunday afternoon with what it called a “ Tribute to Takemitsu” at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center, with its actual Japanese garden, where the audience can retreat before the concert and at intermission.

But the contemplative beauty of the garden was hard to hold onto once inside the James Armstrong Theatre.

Music director Heiichiro Ohyama--who, when not conducting this orchestra, is busy conducting his other orchestras in Santa Barbara, Texas and New York, or running various chamber music festivals around the country, or playing or teaching the viola, or guest-conducting in Europe and Japan--may be the model of the modern musician as frazzled, globe-trotting super-achiever.

Nor did he seem to have any inclination to slow down for Takemitsu. The short viola concerto, “A String Around Autumn,” sounded under-rehearsed and was overwhelmed by its surroundings--a loud and intense performance of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and an unabashedly aggressive, if genuinely exciting, account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

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The afternoon, in fact, appeared so little concerned with Takemitsu that the program notes gave no information about the concerto, even that it was written in 1989 or that its title was taken from a poem by Makoto Ooka that begins with the stunning line “Sink / don’t sing.”

The score--made of short gestures in the solo viola that float up through watery orchestral texture without ever quite reaching the surface--has just that drowsy effect of song not fully articulated. It is simple music but an effect difficult to achieve, one that needs to get beyond conventional articulation of phrase. The soloist, Yasushi Toyoshima, the principal violist of the New Japan Philharmonic, was rock solid, and, one suspects, a terrific Brahms player.

Instead of Takemitsu, this program was really about Beethoven, about how loud, fast, forceful, visceral and downright rabid Ohyama could make the sybaritic Seventh sound. He took chances; he took no prisoners; and he came out on top. The ensemble was tight; attacks were sharp enough to be dangerous; and a steely, tight tone cut hard through the small, bright auditorium.

The young freelances who make up the Asia America Symphony deserve a word or two. Although the ensemble claims more Asian members than any Southern California professional orchestra, the majority are not Asian, and since Asians are an important component of orchestras most everywhere, the ethnic makeup hardly looks remarkable. What is striking, however, is that the orchestra is nearly three-quarters women, and the strings are more than 85% women. Given just how steely the tone and macho the playing, it was fun all afternoon watching stereotypes of Asians and women so vividly thrown out the window, even if poor Takemitsu had to tumble out along with them.