Throughout his highly creative life, Takemitsu composed numerous concert works, 93 film scores, many incidental scores for radio, TV and theater, a detective novel and critical works on music, film and literature. He was a leading intellectual, and had an insatiable appetite for popular culture (especially film), and had an encyclopedic knowledge of Western popular music. It is this very same stylistic versatility and knowledge of popular song idioms that is on display in the present recital. While Takemitsu's reputation as one of the 20th century's greatest modernists is recognized around the world, his accomplishments as a song writer are largely unknown outside Japan. The songs on this program come from all stages of Takemitsu's creative life, from the 1950s to the year of his death, and are primarily drawn from his music for radio and film - but each is a superbly crafted miniature, by turns tuneful, elegant and fragile.