Credits:

Takuo Yuasa

Description:

Born as the third son of the writer Rynosuke Akutagawa, Yasushi Akutagawa lost his father at the age of two. Growing up, he listened avidly to Stravinskys *The Firebird* and *Petrushka* among the SP records his father had left behind, and by the time he was in middle school, he had decided to become a composer. He first studied under Kunihiko Hashimoto, who helped his talent blossom, and later studied under Akira Ifukube, who had a profound influence on him and helped him develop his distinctive, untamed compositional style. His earliest work, Symphony in Three Movements (1948), is a landmark piece: he took it with him to the Soviet Union (as it was then), a place he longed to visit, where it caught the attention of great composers and achieved the remarkable feat of being published there. In his work Erola Symphony, composed ten years later, his former lyricism receded into the background, givi