Originally a horn player in the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra, Hiroshi Ohguri was the leading composer of Osaka, a city with its own special culture and spoken language (Osaka-ben) very different in character from that of Tokyo. Much of Ohguri’s music reflects the sounds of Osaka-ben, the folk songs and nursery rhymes of the Osaka area, Buddhist and Shintoist music and other traditional sounds of Japanese music. The exciting, brilliantly orchestrated Violin Concerto uses many of these traditional elements in a way that is suggestive of Bartók, Kodály and Khachaturian.