Calling Timbuktu

Dai Fujikura wrote Calling Timbuktu for orchestra between 2001 and 2003, in his mid-twenties and a few years after leaving Osaka for Britain, where he had arrived at fifteen and studied with Daryl Runswick, Edwin Roxburgh and George Benjamin. The title points to a place invoked as a byword for remoteness rather than described. Fujikura's orchestral writing of this period works through layered textures and finely graded timbre rather than through theme and development, and it brought him a series of European prizes while he was still a student. It belongs to the years in which he was moving between the chamber ensemble and the full orchestra: the eighteen-month project the London Sinfonietta ran for him under Peter Eötvös, which ended in April 2004 with Fifth Station, was already under way. The Bulgarian public heard the piece for the first time on 25 November 2004, when the Sofia Philharmonic played it under Nayden Todorov in the concert marking the Days of Japanese Culture in Bulgaria — a programme that set the young Japanese composer beside Rachmaninoff and Beethoven, with the pianist Midori Arima as soloist.