Akira Imai Plays Contemporary Japanese Piano Music

The distinguished Japanese pianist Akira Imai came of age in a Japan where musical traditions were being increasingly opened up to western influences and techniques – and as a student of the great Paul Badura-Skoda in VIenna, he's an acknowledged authority on Beethoven as well as an artist of unique poetry and intelligence. But in this fascinating recital, filmed in 1985 in the Amerikahaus in Munich, he explores the Japanese postwar piano tradition; a programme that features the keyboard music of Mutsuo Shishido, Akira Miyoshi and Makoto Moroi, built around the substantial Piano Sonata of 1961 by Akio Yashiro, a student of Nadia Boulanger.