Abe: Symphony No. 1, Divertimento & Sinfonietta

Exciting music energetically performed, not always subtle but torridly lyric. Komei Abe was a generation younger than that pioneering Japanese composer Kósçak Yamada (1886-1965) and he inherited something of the older man’s compositional zeal. He was born in Hiroshima in 1911 and studied in turn the violin and cello before entering Tokyo Music School. He formed a chamber group in which he played as a cellist, whilst studying under one of the many German émigrés then active in Japan, Heinrich Werkmeister, only three year’s Abe’s senior. He next came into contact with the Mahler protégé Klaus Pringsheim under whom Abe studied composition. In time he came to admire Hindemith whilst consolidating the late Romantic sensibility nurtured by Pringsheim. Abe once declared himself a "modern and international Japanese, rather than archaic Japanese" implicitly dissociating himself from nationalism – from, as the notes say, de Falla, Stravinsky and Bartók. After the war during the latter part of