"This project involves exploring and the study of the composer's work, which in this case is Daï Fujikura. It was my privilege to have known the composer when he was just beginning his career. This is important, because everything becomes clearer when you have the “big picture”.

Unusually for this beginning of the 21st century, Fujikura is attracted to an instrumental attitude more typical of the romantic period. He gives great importance to what I would call the “ardent sound” of the instrument, which of course involves the romantic vibrato. This doesn't stop him using avant-garde instrumental techniques...His use of percussion instruments requires expressive playing which paradoxically seems to hark back to Japanese musical tradition. Emotion and feeling are everywhere present in his music." - Pascal Gallois

Although Dai Fujikura was born in Osaka, he has now spent more than 20 years in the UK, where he studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin. During the last decade he has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Huddersfield Festival Young Composers Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in UK.

In his native Japan, he was given the special honour of a portrait concert in Suntory Hall in October 2012. In London, where he lives with his wife and family, he has now received two BBC Proms commissions, his Double Bass Concerto was recently premiered by the London Sinfonietta, and in 2013 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the UK premiere of ‘Atom’ as part of 'Total Immersion: Sounds from Japan'.

Numerous composers have written for Pascal Gallois, solo bassoon with the Ensemble Intercontemporain - amongst them György Kurtág, Olga Neuwirth, Philippe Fenelon and Brice Pauset, as well as Luciano Berio, who dedicated 'Sequenza XII' to him in 1995. That same year, he premiered the bassoon version of 'Dialogue de l'ombre double' by Pierre Boulez. Gallois has written a bassoon method intended for composers: 'Die Spieltechnik des Fagotts' (Bärenreiter).