CHILDHOOD JOURNEYS

Violist Hiyoli Togawa speaks to Carlos María Solare about her latest recording, Children!, which mixes new music with Bach and is based around the themes of childhood memories and family love

When I met Hiyoli Togawa to talk about her latest recording project, I didn’t think we would spend more than 40 minutes on our interview. More than two enthralling hours later, we bade each other goodbye after a delightful chat that touched upon more subjects that could even be mentioned here. Both being based in Berlin, we agreed on German as lingua franca for our conversation, but Togawa, who was born and grew up in Germany, is equally fluent in Japanese (her father’s native language) and English (through her Australian mother).

Unsurprisingly with such a multinational background, thoughts of homeland and belonging are prominent in her mind (for instance, she is curious to learn what lured her Argentinian interviewer to settle in Berlin), and we came back to these subjects once and again during our talk.

Children!, Togawa’s latest CD, which combines the Allemandes from Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites with works the violist commissioned in 2021–22, is a direct descendant of Songs of Solitude, the unaccompanied album she recorded in between lockdowns in 2020. Back then, she commissioned eleven composers from all over the world to ‘put into music the feelings of isolation and loneliness’ that everyone experienced during those interminable months. The recording, which I reviewed enthusiastically in the July 2021 issue of The Strad, intertwined these pieces with the six Sarabandes from Bach’s Suites. Togawa, who gave birth to her second daughter during the pandemic, found herself thinking about ‘the situation of those children who do not have a loving home, who were forced to stay at home during lockdown and who as a result were helplessly exposed to violence, hunger or poverty. The current crises in the world produce traumatised children every second; they aren’t safe, they lack a sense of the familiar, a protected space, a home.’

ALL PHOTOS ANNE HORNEMANN

‘THESE PIECES ARE SO MANY MUSICAL PLEADINGS FOR THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN WORLDWIDE’

Home – we come back to this significant concept. Togawa and her husband, percussion virtuoso Alexej Gerassimez, have often wondered about its meaning. He has a similarly international background, having been born in Germany of Ukrainian stock. Shortly before the Russian invasion, Gerassimez and his father went back to Kyiv to look for relatives of his grandfather, who had left the country many years before. They didn’t succeed, and the subsequent events have made it all but impossible that they ever will. ‘Our home,’ says Togawa, ‘is now the little family that we have created together.’ When putting her daughters to bed, she often sings them a Japanese lullaby called Itsuki no Komoriuta, which tells of a little girl who has had to leave her native land. This song, arranged by Gerassimez for viola and handpan, is touchingly placed at the end of the album, ‘a wordless prayer for every child in the world who can’t enjoy familial love and care’. Most of the pieces in the programme, Togawa adds, include ‘a little prayer of their own’. The album opens with another Japanese lullaby that also has a personal connection for Togawa, whose grandmother sang it to her father in Osaka, and which she also sings to her daughters. Coincidentally, the song was chosen by Toshio Hosokawa for his contribution to the project. ‘When Toshio sent me his setting for unaccompanied viola, I was deeply moved, feeling a connection to my dead grandmother and through her to the Japanese part of my heritage.’

Conversely, a composer she didn’t previously know provided an unforeseen bridge to Togawa’s Australian ancestry. Elliott Gyger (who was recommended to her by Brett Dean) hails from Melbourne, where Togawa has relatives on her mother’s side. His piece Chanting evokes ‘a playground with children singing and playing, their parents calling them to order when things threaten to get dangerous. The wish that all children may be able to play together with no worries is captured in it.’ As a whole, the album constitutes ‘a collection of childhood memories and adventures and lullabies: playful, wild, quiet, funny, serious or dreamy. These pieces are so many musical pleadings for the rights of children worldwide.’

Ofthe 13 composers – from Iran, Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania, Estonia, Japan, the US, Italy, Germany, Austria, Finland, Australia and China – that took part in Togawa’s Children! project, five had already been involved in Songs of Solitude. One of them is the Finn, Kalevi Aho, whom she describes as one of her ‘greatest friends’. Besides those two commissions, Aho used the lockdown time to complete a double concerto for viola, percussion and chamber orchestra dedicated to Togawa and Gerassimez, who premiered it in Lahti in March 2022. ‘It is through Kalevi that I developed a curiosity for working closely with composers, which in the classical music industry’s daily routine is by no means a given.’ Aho’s lullaby Nuku, lapsoseni (Sleep, little child) is an older composition of his, which he provided with a new setting for the present project. ‘When playing it,’ says Togawa, ‘I feel as if I’m accompanying him on a search for the lost time of his childhood in Forssa, southern Finland.’ Federico Gardella, another Songs of Solitude veteran, responded to her second request by gifting her a toy piano.

‘Although it’s a toy, it has its place in this programme,’ she explains. ‘It is indeed a magical instrument for accompanying Federico’s Wiegenlied (Lullaby). The viola’s deep tones are like a mother singing her children to sleep, while on the toy piano we hear the children who remain agitated until they find their way to sleep with the last note, where the instruments come together.’

Proceeding to the Bach section of Children!, Togawa explains that she sees the Suites’ allemandes as ‘doors to a new world, a world of dance. They express an “outdoors” kind of freedom – my two-year-old also thinks so! Children love to dance; even those who haven’t been exposed to music do. Bach’s allemandes are in their very different ways – the unfiltered joy of no.3, say, or the reverential no.6 – symbols of an idealistically peaceful world.’

Hiyoli Togawa at the sessions in Berlin’s Andreaskirche, where she recorded the album’s unaccompanied works

Togawa went back to Berlin’s Andreaskirche, where she had set down Songs of Solitude in 2020, to record the unaccompanied works, before turning to Nikodemuskirche for the pieces with piano. She is full of praise for producer Martin Nagorni, and thankful for the unstinting help offered by Robert von Bahr, BIS’s founder and director, who ‘spent untold hours mulling over each piece’s ideal place within the programme’. Togawa is an artist as well as a violist, and one of her paintings now adorns von Bahr’s Stockholm studio. Togawa’s leitmotif of childhood extends to the CD’s booklet, charmingly illustrated with pictures of the interpreters and composers as children alongside their present selves. It makes sense that the recording’s release event didn’t take place at a regular venue but as a benefit concert in Berlin’s ‘Children’s Embassy’, an outfit of the internationally active German charity, SOS Kinderdorf. As in her previous album, Togawa plays a viola made by Antonio Casini in Modena c.1690, using a bow by Benoît Rolland. When we spoke, the moment was approaching to return the instrument to its owner, but she was looking forward to renewing acquaintance with the 1733 Leidolff viola she had used previously. ‘It belonged to my father [Tomoyuki Togawa is a violist with the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra]; when I was learning the violin as a child, I used to take it out and play it when he wasn’t home, against his strict orders. He gave it to me for my 18th birthday. Returning to it now will be – again – like coming home.’

WORKS Bach Allemandes from Suites for solo cello BWV1007–12 Hosokawa Komori-Uta (Lullaby of Itsuki) Doderer The Little Bird Razaz The Golden Bee Lill Lullaby Gyger Chanting Oshima Flower Povolotsky Here Comes a Swallow Aho Nuku, lapsoseni Gardella Wiegenlied Rotaru Co(ho) quet(us) reMix Buffa To the Unknown Voice Lu Wang Sparrows and Puffins Gerassimez Lullaby of Itsuki ARTISTS Hiyoli Togawa (viola) Kiveli Dörken (piano) Alexej Gerassimez (percussion)

RECORDING VENUE Nikodemuskirche, Berlin, Germany; Andreaskirche, Berlin-Wannsee, Germany RECORDING DATES 26–28 September 2022 (Nikodemuskirche); 18 January, 13–15 February 2023 (Andreaskirche)

CATALOGUE NO BIS BIS-2643

RELEASE DATE out now