The dissemination of music from his last two decades has tended to draw attention away from the works Toru Takemitsu wrote in the 20 years after his Western breakthrough. This release redresses the balance with two of his most significant earlier pieces. More radical as his thinking may then have been, it did not prevent a work such as Green (1967) from juxtaposing dissonance and euphony with a sure mastery of transition. Most valuable, however, is the first complete recording of Arc - its six movements taking shape during 1963-66, to comprise the most ambitious work of Takemitsu's “modernist” phase.

Although inspired by the virtuosity of Yuji Takahashi, Arc is not a piano concerto per se - its solo part having being conceived in a concertante relationship with the orchestra. Nor is progress over its two parts one of consistently evolving momentum, though the sheer density of “Your love and the crossing” is a powerful midway culmination that gives the next two movements a function of reprise, before “Coda: shall begin from the end” forms a natural rounding-off - albeit one which, with the piano conspicuous by its absence, brings the whole work only obliquely full-circle.

Responsive to the piano's many flights of fancy, Rolf Hind is rightly balanced within the orchestra, and Oliver Knussen is as mindful of the music's Messiaenic fervour as of its deep repose. Detailed notes by Julian Anderson (who has effectively realised Arc's extensive use of graphic notation), and a disc to refute any notion of earlier Takemitsu as being less characteristic than the music he went on to compose.