Toshiro Mayuzumi was one of Japan’s foremost 20th-century composers, enjoying a distinguished international reputation on a par with that of Toru Takemitsu, as well as that of an enfant terrible of the post-war Japanese music world. Versatile and prolific, he contributed music for films, the theatre, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and broadcasts. His enthusiasm for avant-garde Western music led him to study in Paris, and the Phonologie Symphonique is a synthesis of Varèse-like acoustical experiment and serial techniques. The jazz-tinted Bacchanale is Mayuzumi’s attempt to produce ‘a cosmos of sounds reflecting the vital energies of the origin of music’, and the symphonic poem Samsara is a musical expression of Buddhist teaching, an attempt to escape the seemingly endless cycle of birth and rebirth.