Since the Paris World Exhibition of 1889, French composers have been fascinated by Asian art and music. The Balinese scales had a formative influence on Debussy’s “impressionistic” harmony and melody. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, in turn, was fascinated by this already “Asianized” French music and combined it with his own idiom. The Finnish pianist Sanna Vaarni traces the influences from West to East and vice versa on her album “Les yeux clos”. In the piano piece of the same name, Takemitsu refers to a painting by the French symbolist Odilon Redon, which shows a woman with closed eyes, sleeping or dead. Thus his delicate piece, fanning out in garlands, also becomes an epitaph for a friend. The confrontation with Olivier Messiaen’s “Ile du feu I and II”, composed 30 years earlier (1949), shows a much harder style of the Frenchman, which is based on dances of the Papuans in New Guinea, here used percussively. In his “Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus”, “Noël” is based on a Hindu rhythm, and a Korean melody also appears later. The highlight is certainly the hymn-like “Le baiser de l’Enfant”, brought to overwhelming heights by Vaardi with all his passion. The Frenchman’s more compact intensity clearly sets it apart from the much airier, softer linearity of the Japanese. This not only results in an interesting comparison of two mutually influencing sound worlds, but also a highly varied insight into piano music of the 20th century.