Like his countryman Tōru Takemitsu, Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa has written often and well for the classical guitar. This new recording from Swedish-born guitarist Jacob Kellermann and friends brings together a number of Hosokawa’s works featuring the instrument in different guises: solo, accompanying and as protagonist in a concerto.

As Hosokawa writes in his commentaries on each work: ‘In Japanese, the word for “body” (mi) assumes the existence of flesh and spirit as one. I am always trying to compose music that has this kind of unified “body”.’ Other qualities and analogues abound, such as those of negative space (ma), calligraphy and the blooming lotus flower.

The works for voice and guitar, Two Japanese Folk Songs and Renka I, evoke not just the unsettling atmosphere and yugen of Noh theatre with its koto-accompanied utterances but the spare, melancholic songs of John Dowland. Soprano Ilse Eerens captures the variously sensuous, haunting or lonely images with a stark, expressive clarity, Kellermann’s guitar painting figures and washes in the air.

There is little between these songs and the Serenade and Twelve Japanese Songs, both for solo guitar, where the former’s ‘In the Moonlight’ and ‘Dream Path’ evoke nocturnal landscapes traditionally depicted in poetry and painting. Here, Kellermann again proves himself the master of line and colour, especially in his ability to savour the silences falling around solitary tones, and to relish the more melodic aspects of the music as they surface.

Voyage IX, ‘Awakening’ is one of a series of concertos written by Hosokawa for different solo instruments ‘in which the soloist symbolises man, and the orchestra the universe, nature and the world that encloses him within and without’. Here, the composer imagines ‘the guitar as a lotus flower, and the string orchestra as water (a pond)’. It’s a marvellous work, the guitar and strings-and-percussion ensemble manifesting layers of organic strata and generative interactions between the part and the whole with a profound, intuitive logic. Kellerman and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra under Christian Karlsen are likewise sensitive to the placement and potentialities of tones and totalities, (re-)creating a sound world at once alien and comforting.