Ohzawa: Piano Concerto No. 3, \'Kamikaze\' / Symphony No. 3

Hisato Ohzawa, one of the foremost Japanese composers of the first half of the twentieth century, studied in the 1930s in Boston and Paris. He had an excellent command of diverse styles derived from his extensive knowledge of jazz, late Romanticism, Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Hindemith and other contemporary composers. The Piano Concerto No. 3 ‘Kamikaze’ (a Japanese-made civil aircraft of that time, which set a new record for the shortest flight from Tokyo to London in 1937) shares something of the motoric dynamism of Honegger and Prokofiev. Symphony No. 3, written in 1937 to celebrate the 2600th Anniversary of the Founding of Japan, leans towards late Romanticism, Myaskovsky and Roussel.