Now regarded as one of the most important composers of the second half of the twentieth century, Toru Takemitsu was the first Japanese composer to gain international status. The works on this disc cover Takemitsu’s career from the early Solitude Sonore to Spirit Garden, ‘my experiment with and on-going inquiry into orchestral colour and melody’, composed two years before his death. Inspired by a dream, A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden has become one of Takemitsu’s most performed works, notable for the interweaving of silences, passages of randomness, surges of dissonance and delicate fragmentary melodies.