Okeanos 7 July 2006
City of London Festival

Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers [read review in full]

"This early evening concert of unknown music was a high point of the City of London Festival. It was superbly conceived to display the Japanese instruments in the ideal setting of St Lawrence....

This important concert to foster international understanding in difficult times was recorded by BBC R3 for "future broadcasting". It ought to be put out at peak listening time... "


Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph

"This year, the City of London Festival has taken Japanese music and culture as its theme. Some of the events have given us what purists call the "real thing", ie the untouched traditional music performed by revered masters....

The concert the following night also married East and West. It consisted of recently composed pieces for Okeanos, a sextet that combines Japanese lutes, bamboo flutes and zither with Western instruments.

Here the danger of kitsch was avoided by cutting out anything romantic and tonal. Instead, ancient traditional sounds were put cheek-by-jowl with austerely modernist Western ones. This is not such an odd juxtaposition as it sounds, because the Japanese aesthetic of focusing on individual sounds is characteristic of much modern Western music, too.

The results were never less than intriguing, and were often entrancingly beautiful. Dai Fujikura's Okeanos Breeze is a brilliantly virtuoso use of Okeanos's rich palette, but the more austere palette of Mai Fukasawa's Forgotten Psalm was no less effective."