Yasushi Akutagawa

Yasushi Akutagawa was the son of Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892 -- 1927), one of Japan's most important authors of the early twentieth century. He studied music in Tokyo and was later a student of Akira Ifukube and Kunihiko Hashimoto during the late '40s. Akutagawa's music was much more Western in character than that of Ifukube, and he was strongly drawn to the music of the Soviet Union, as exemplified by Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Akutagawa's work encompassed both programmatic and absolute music, the former including the opera Kurai Kagami (1960) (later revised as Orpheus of Hiro...