Two composers, a generation and a hemisphere apart, meet in one song. Joseph Kosma, Budapest-born and Paris-made, wrote melodies for the poets and film-makers of France's golden age, above all for Marcel Carné's films and the poems of Jacques Prévert. Their “Les Feuilles mortes,” written for the 1946 film Les Portes de la nuit, crossed the Atlantic as “Autumn Leaves” and became one of the most recorded songs on earth, sung by Montand and Piaf, transformed by Miles Davis and Bill Evans.
Tōru Takemitsu, Japan's greatest twentieth-century composer, first heard Western music as a teenager in the aftermath of war and taught himself composition from records and scores. Stravinsky discovered his Requiem for Strings by accident and pronounced it a masterpiece; the world's orchestras agreed, and his November Steps put the biwa and shakuhachi on the stage of the New York Philharmonic. All his life he loved what he called “song”, chanson, jazz standards, film tunes, and made tender arrangements of his favourites for guitar and for string quartet.
His quartet setting of Kosma's Autumn Leaves is a meeting of these two worlds: a Parisian melody drifting through Japanese-tinted harmony, each composer made more luminous by the other.
