Darius Milhaud (1892 – 1974) has been pursuing his interest in regional styles of music throughout his life. He was introduced to Brazilian folk and popular music between 1916 and 1918, a period that he spent in Rio de Janeiro as cultural attaché to the French ambassador, the poet Paul Claudel. None the less, "Brasiliera" from his suite "Scaramouche" (1936) has little to do with the music of Latin America, the reminiscence being limited to its title.

"Hora staccato" is the best-known work by the Romanian composer and violinist Grigoras Dinicu (1889 – 1949). Dinicu studied the violin with Carl Flesch at the Bucharest Conservatory and mostly wrote for the violin and piano. His works pick up numerous elements of Eastern European folk music.

Vittorio Monti (1868 – 1922) from Naples was similarly trained as a violinist and as a composer. Although he wrote a number of ballets and operettas, he is chiefly remembered for a single virtuoso work, "Csardas", a piece originally scored for mandolin or violin and piano. Monti was inspired by the wave of enthusiasm for Eastern European music that was then sweeping across the continent, creating a piece that both idealizes and canonizes the musical idiom of the gypsies.

Aram Chatschaturyan (1903 – 1978) was born in Tbilisi. Not surprisingly, his music contains many elements of Armenian music. He first came to international attention with his Piano Concerto in 1937 and with the Violin Concerto that he wrote for David Oistrakh in 1940. As with Monti and Dinicu, his popularity rests on a single piece, the "Sabre Dance" from his ballet "Gayaneh".

The French composer Christian Lauba was born in 1952 and now lives and works in Bordeaux. Most of the music that he has composed for solo saxophone or saxophone ensemble has been written for Jean-Marie Londeix and his pupils at the Bordeaux Conservatoire. These works include a series of concert studies for each member of the saxophone family, each piece exploring a particular performing technique. "Jungle" for alto saxophone uses a slap tongue technique, which sounds as if it is produced by the instrument’s keys.

The Japanese saxophonist and composer Ryo Noda was born in 1948. Among his teachers is Jean-Marie Londeix. He became known to a wider public through his "Improvisations I–III", which are based on the performance technique of the Japanese shakuhachi, an end-blown bamboo flute. "Maï" is a retelling of an ancient Japanese samurai legend and includes typical elements of shakuhachi playing such as free rhythms, a wide dynamic range and ornamentation at the end of each phrase.

The Japanese composer and pianist Fuminori Tanada was born in 1961 and inhabits a world that draws in equal measure on Japanese music and contemporary European music. He studied at the National University of Art and Music in Tokyo and at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris. He is currently the pianist for the Ensemble Itinéraire, a group of fifteen soloists that perform only new music. In "Mysterious Morning III" he creates a variety of different moods by means of a wide range of novel performance techniques.

Dirk Jaehner
(Translation: Stewart Spencer)