Orchestral works, 4

"Uzu is Toshio Hosokawa's starkly palindromic title for axgripping 24-minute orchestral work from 2019 ... As with many other works by Hosokawa, the music emerges from something elemental, even primitive, and against this background he charts a remarkably imaginative and absorbing musical surface ... Conductor Jun Märkl and the Hague Residentie ORchestra clearly relish the way Hosokawa's sound-textures constantly migrate between massive, sustained sonorities and much more febrile evocations of quasi-electronic effects ... In all the recordings even the most dense textures are delineated with admirable clarity, and the two principal soloists excel ... I sense that Uzu is the work most likely to appeal to listeners who prefer a modernism that drifts inexorably towards regions of dark yet also defiant melancholia".