Fumio Yasuda - My Choice

2021 release

Fumio Yasuda briefly describes his motivation as the attempt to invent something new, as he feels neither exclusively connected to classical music nor to the world of improvisation. He cites the late Romantic compositions of Franz Schmidt as decisive influences, but also John Cage's border crossings.
Yasuda, born in 1953, is the poet among contemporary composers. He learned to play the classical piano in his childhood and studied composition at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo.
At 20, he joins the avant-garde jazz group "Angry Waves" led by Masayuki „Jojo" Takayanagi. Yasuda is at home in the world of jazz as well as contemporary classical music. From the mid-nineties he collaborated with Nobuyoshi Araki, one of Japan's most important photographers, and composed for Arakinema: "Tokyo Comedy" (1997, Secession Vienna), "1999 Taipei - Summer" (1999 in Taipei) and "Shijo" (1998, Deichtorhallen Hamburg).
Nobuyoshi Araki introduces Yasuda to Stefan Winter and Mariko Takahashi in the late 1990s. An exciting collaboration begins, year after year cross-disciplinary recording works, sound art installations, film art and performances in venues as diverse as the Musikverein in Vienna, crown jewel among the world's concert halls, John Zorn's The Stone, space for experimental music in New York, on the famous beach stage of Jazzaldia in San Sebastian, the oldest Spanish and one of the oldest European jazz festivals still in existence, and in Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo, one of the most sonorous concert halls in the world.
His debut album "Kakyoku" on Winter & Winter "conquers ... through the art of transforming the familiar into the own, of mirroring the model until something new has emerged in tiny mutations, possibly even blurs of vision." (Andreas Obst, F.A.Z.). Recordings are made with the Basel Chamber Orchestra, the European Art Orchestra, a soloist ensemble with musicians from the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Bernd Ruf, vocalist Theo Bleckmann, the Spanish baroque ensemble Forma Antiqva conducted by Aarón Zapico and the clarinettist Joachim Badenhorst together with Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and the singer Akimuse ("Forest"), in addition to piano solo productions and audio films (cinema for closed eyes) such as "Charmed with Verdi" and "On the Path of Death and Life“.
The sound artwork "Poem of a Cell" with compositions and participation of Fumio Yasuda has been presented in Tanzania, Spain, Germany, Israel, France and Japan.
Fumio Yasuda writes film music, including for Kang-sheng Lee's "Help Me Eros," and composes the soundtrack for the NHK series "Going down the Asian Highway," a travel documentary that shows the continuous transformation of real Asia along the "Asian Highway," a road network that crosses 32 countries from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east.
For "Muramatsu Original Series" he has been writing compositions for flute and piano since 1994, which have become standard works for flutists around the world.
Fumio Yasuda's multi-facetted re-compositions of works by Giuseppe Verdi, Erik Satie, Richard Rodgers and children's songs from the Mother Goose collection are among the most extraordinary adaptations in the musical world.
2020 marks the world premiere of the sound art work "The Ninth Wave - Ode To Nature" based on Ludwig van Beethoven, a collaboration between author and director Stefan Winter and composer Fumio Yasuda. Music, the art of noise, dance and film unite to create a total work of art.
In 2021, Fumio Yasuda is working on the 7-hour art performance with 7-artists »The Glass Cage«, a work created in times of isolation and distance.

Fumio Yasuda's "Director's Cut" opens an exciting view into his sound world. Composition, improvisation and adaptation become one. His music is a mirror of our culture. "Last Choral" from his Accordion Concerto, was composed by Fumio Yasuda for soloist Teodoro Anzellotti and the Basel Chamber Orchestra. "A Song for Lucrezia" was written for Stefan Winter's production of "Der Kastanienball - The Fall of Lucrezia Borgia" for Festspiel + at the Munich Opera Festival. The pieces from the album "Kakyoku" are closely related to works by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Fumio Yasuda's "My Choice" features other works in collaboration with the singer Theo Bleckmann from the collection "Mother Goose" and the album "Las Vegas Rhapsody" and the outstanding jazz clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst, with whom Fumio Yasuda is closely associated. The album closes with "Eternal Love", a composition written for the Spanish ensemble Forma Antiqva, normally at home in the world of Baroque, for the sound and 3-channel film production "Poem of a Cell". Fumio Yasuda's works embody Winter & Winter's philosophy that the boundaries between musical genres are a creation of science, not art.