Flutist Tessa Brinckman and koto-player Mitsuki Dazai perform a geo-poetic, dazzling program of music, “Ocean Dust” by composers who draw on traditional music from all over the world, for flute/alto flute/piccolo & koto/bass koto.

This flute and koto concert opens for the Britt Orchestra’s program Eastern Inspiration. The orchestra performs Shanghai Overture by Bright Sheng, Le Chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) by Igor Stravinsky & Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) by Gustav Mahler.

Avant-composer Yuji Takahashi sets Emily Dicksonson’s Because I Could Not Stop For Death in his minimalist, eerie evocation, Horses Heads Were Towards Eternity.

Shakuhachi player John Kaizan Neptune wrote 5+13=Prime Number as a grooving interplay of Indian and Japanese folk, urban blues and rainforest song.

The Australian composer Jim Franklin describes his A Lattice of Winds as a weaving of lines and figures that share meeting points, and is equally avant-European and avant-Japanese in character.

Shingo Ikegami, a prodigious koto, shamisen and kokyu player, depicts Ochi-Tsubaki (Falling Camellias) that fall intact to the ground, “with no regrets about leaving this world”.

Umi Sajin, composed by the performers, Tessa Brinckman and Mitsuki Dazai was inspired by accounts of the Dust Bowl and the Great Garbage Patches in the Pacific Ocean, expressing the ambivalence of human survival in a destructive world.