When Igor Stravinsky was introduced to Toru Takemitsu in 1959, he was taken aback by the young Japanese composer's frail, slight frame. "How could such severe music come have come from such a tiny man?" he is said to have wondered aloud. Just prior to their meeting, the elder composer had happened upon a recording of Takemitsu's haunting Requiem, a piece for string orchestra composed in 1957, when Takemitsu was just 27 years old.

The severity that so struck Stravinsky is apparent even from a cursory glance at the score: all three sections of the work are ponderously slow (Lento, Modère, Moins Lent; "I was never able to write an Allegro," the composer once quipped); likewise, the variety of orchestral color that one encounters in Takemitsu's later works (such as From me flows what you call Time from 1990) is absent, ceding the weight of expression to the slow, wrenching harmonies and the subtleties of the string scoring. The first section is characterized by a rich texture of chordal accompaniment, against which Takemitsu's angular melodies proceed. The middle section is punctuated by more forceful, homorhythmic passages, as well as occasional unison lines unadorned by harmonic underpinning. The last section builds in intensity, heightened by the spare use of effects like portamenti and string harmonics. The harmony ends ambiguously, underneath a violin solo that follows a twisting, ascending path into the ether.

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