Kaori Muraji – Soleil: Portraits 2 (2010/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 59:23 minutes | 512 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.

Kaori Muraji (村治佳織; born 14 April 1978) is a Japanese classical guitarist. She is the first Japanese artist to have signed an exclusive international contract with Decca Music Group.

Muraji learned to play the guitar from the age of 3 on. First she was taught by her father and from the age of ten by the guitarist Shinichi Fukuda. In the early 1990s she won several guitar competition in Japan and in 1993 gave her debut recital in the Tsuda Hall. In the same year she published with Espressivo her first album and in the following she had her Orchestra debut with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1997 she moved to Europe to study under Alberto Ponce at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. After her graduation 1999 she moved back to Japan.
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Kaori Muraji – Kaori Muraji Plays Bach (2008)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:11:28 minutes | 658 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.

Decca’s Kaori Muraji Plays Bach doesn’t make any pretensions toward representing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in his historical element as has become commonplace. The orchestra used to accompany star guitarist Kaori Muraji in transcriptions of two Bach harpsichord concertos and the Air on a G String (to utilize this movement’s popular title), the so-called Leipzig Bach Collegium, is a typical chamber orchestra made up of modern instruments, played in a modern way; sometimes the string basses even employ pizzicato effects, a device alien to Bach in his known orchestral scores. Likewise the part-writing in the orchestral accompaniments have been tweaked, particularly in the Air on a G String where figures in the solo part interact in a dialogue with similar gestures in the orchestra; a feature that will certainly cause Bach purists in the audience to say, “What the hell?” To get to first base with Kaori Muraji Plays Bach one will need to be able to accept the long-held notion that Bach can just about survive any treatment one can put him through or to simply not to care about the matter. Muraji, as is her wont, plays just as well here as she does on her other discs, and the solo pieces – “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (which sounds a little like it is overdubbed) the D minor Violin Partita and, as a bonus track, the Minuets BWV Anh. 114-115 once attributed to Bach and now known as the work of Christian Pezold are the highlights of the disc. In the orchestrally accompanied tracks Muraji is often a little buried in the mix and the tone of the string group is a little heavy, sounding a little like the “Baroque orchestras” common to recordings made in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s not too much of a distraction, though, and the reading of the oft-transcribed “Siciliano” in the E major harpsichord concerto is genuinely lovely.
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