‘Tokyo: Art and Photography’ at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

29 July 2021 – 3 January 2022

Ahhh… Edo, Edo, Edo… …city of dreams, and occasional nightmares… …as Kumagai Jiro Naozane in the final part of the Kabuki play ‘Kumagai Jinya’ (Kumagai’s Battle Camp) says about the fragility of human existence “Juroku nen wa hito mukashi, aa, yume da yume da” (Sixteen years, like a day. Ahhh! It’s a dream, a dream). And if any phrase best represents both the negative and positive potentialities that have emerged from the natural and man-made adversities that have afflicted Tokyo and best reflect, at least in the mind of this reviewer, its impermanence, of almost continual destruction and re-construction since its inception as Edo, it is this one.

Music Review: Chisato Kusunoki “Piano”

Kusunoki’s playing is like the touch of silk!

Piano is an astute collected works by Russian composers Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Medtner, Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Liapunov splendidly performed by German-born pianist Chisato Kusunoki.

The brilliant musician and scholar started playing her preferred instrument when she was just five years old. She was a natural student who has developed into a