What You Hear Isn’t What You’ll Get

Each of these recordings was made in what’s known as a vineyard concert hall--the acoustical model for Walt Disney Concert Hall. The Berlin Philharmonic was captured in its home theater, the Philharmonie, the first hall that placed the audience around the orchestra in terraced pavilions. The Chandos disc is the first commercial recording from the Sapporo Concert Hall, designed by the Disney acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota.

It would be nice if these CDs offered a virtual reality preview of music in Disney. But capturing a concert hall’s acoustical ambience is what standard digital technology does worst. So it’s not surprising that little of the Philharmonie’s spaciousness comes across in the Berlin recording. Instead, the engineers have gone for detail, immediacy and clarity. And that is no bad thing, because Nagano leads a magnificent performance, the best on CD.

Chandos’ engineers do a more credible job of creating the feel of sitting in an engaging open space, and that is all to the good, because the Sapporo Symphony would not likely hold up to the same scrutiny that the great Berlin Philharmonic does. But that means Chandos compromises the illuminating sense of clarity, the presence that every instrument seems to have in Kitara, Sapporo’s nickname for its hall.

The real interest in this disc is that it offers first recordings of two Toru Takemitsu film and television scores. One is a four-movement suite taken from the soundtrack to “Ran,” Akira Kurosawa’s reworking of “King Lear.” In it, the composer obsesses over an oboe melody in Mahler’s “Song of the Earth,” lifting it off into the mist.

The other score, “Nami no Bon,” must be heard to be believed. As accompaniment for a melodramatic TV show about the plight of second-generation Japanese in Hawaii during World War II, Takemitsu produced a conventionally weepy but memorable tune and then plopped it in changing Debussian and Ivesian landscapes, turning Hawaii into Oz. Atsutada Otaka’s aggressive Fantasy for Organ and Orchestra and Toshio Hosokawa’s more Takemitsu-esque “Memory of Sea” also receive first recordings here.