Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-1997) was one of Japan’s foremost 20th-century composers, enjoying a distinguished international reputation on a par with that of Toru Takemitsu, as well as that of an enfant terrible of the postwar Japanese music world. Versatile and prolific, he contributed music for films, the theatre, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and broadcasts. His enthusiasm for avant-garde Western music led him to study in Paris, and the Phonologie Symphonique is a synthesis of Varèse-like acoustical experiment and serial techniques. The jazz-tinted Bacchanale is Mayuzumi’s attempt to produce ‘a cosmos of sounds reflecting the vital energies of the origin of music’, and the symphonic poem Samsara is a musical expression of Buddhist teaching, an attempt to escape the seemingly endless cycle of birth and rebirth.