Today’s French Music Festival concert in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral featured ZOFO, the piano duet (four hands on one keyboard) of Keisuke Nakagoshi and Eva-Maria Zimmerman. They selected four French composers, whose compositions covered the period between 1881 and 1920. This turned out to offer a wide diversity of impressions of just French music was as it was making the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism.
The program opened with the earliest work, Emmanuel Chabrier’s “Cortège burlesque,” also known as “Pas redoublé.” The alternate title refers to the sort of dance we would call a “quick step,” thoroughly consistent with the adjective “burlesque” and equally inconsistent with the noun “cortège,” whose solemnity is usually reserved for either royal or funereal occasions (if not both). The burlesque spirit ran high in ZOFO’s execution of what amounts to a depiction of a lively pack of boulevardiers (“cortège” tends to connote the plural) cruising their way through the many delights of the Champs-Élysées. Erik Satie was a student (not a very good one) at the Paris Conservatoire when Chabrier composed this little tidbit; and, if he did not learn very much at the Conservatoire, this composition might support the hypothesis that he picked up his own jaunty irreverence by listening to Chabrier.
Chabrier’s spirit was nicely complemented by the four-movement suite that Gabriel Fauré extracted from Masques et bergamasques, a celebration of both courtly and rustic (hence the two nouns in the title) festivities in eighteenth-century France. The score originally called for full orchestra, chorus, and solo tenor. Composed in 1919, all but one of its eight movements were drawn from earlier compositions (including the chorus-and-orchestra setting of Fauré’s popular “Pavane”). The four movements only for orchestra, an overture, menuet, and gavotte (all from an abandoned 1869 symphony) and a pastorale (the only new movement in the set) were then extracted as a suite, for which Fauré then arranged a four-hand piano version.
As might be guessed, there is a striking difference between the three movements composed in 1869, all based on highly traditional structural forms, and the more rustic pastorale of 1919. Fauré had not yet found the voice we now associate with him in 1869; but, taken as an homage to the past, those three early movements have a rather effective charm unto themselves. What was nice about the ZOFO execution is that they did not try to emphasize the contrast of the pastorale, simply allowing it to emerge from the more antiquated opening context with the grace of its more familiar sonorities and rhetoric.
Claude Debussy’s 1914 set of six “épigraphes antiques” (ancient inscriptions) has an equally interesting “origins” story. The music began as part of a suite of twelve movements scored for two flutes, two harps, and celesta to accompany a reading of erotic poems from the Chansons de Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs. The titles of the four-hand movements reflect the epigraphic qualities of the poems with which they were originally associated (English translation from the Dover edition):
- To invoke Pan, god of the summer wind
- For a nameless tomb
- That the night may be auspicious
- For the dancer with crotales (finger cymbals)
- For the Egyptian woman
- To give thanks to the morning rain
These titles were not included in the program, but Nakagoshi was kind enough to recite them to the audience. Since Debussy’s score is rich in descriptive characteristics (much like “La Mer,” but with an entirely different set of sonorities and a rhetorical strategy of the utmost brevity), being told what was being described prior to the performance was definitely helpful. This music has an almost mystical quality that is not found in other Debussy works, and ZOFO captured that quality through a captivating execution of the score.
Having journeyed from Chabrier’s raucousness to Debussy’s subtleties, the program concluded with the most demanding work on the program. This was Lucien Garban’s four-hand arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse.” Nakagoshi referred to this as a “dance of death,” having been composed between 1919 and 1920, when all of Europe was still reeling from the horrors of the First World War; but Ravel himself denied that the music had any macabre nature. As far as he was concerned, it was a deconstruction of the rhetoric of the grand waltz form, reconstructed with a more warped approach to the three-beat metre and scored with such lush orchestration to put all of the nineteenth-century waltz tradition to shame.
To reduce all of that to the far more limited sonorities of a piano keyboard was an ambitious undertaking. Ravel did it himself for both solo piano and two-piano duet; and he prepared these arrangements shortly after completing the orchestral score in 1920. Garban prepared the four-hand arrangement that ZOFO performed at around the same time. To call this music demanding for a pair of pianists on a common keyboard would be the height of understatement. However, in the context of their four-hand performances of Igor Stravinsky (the full scores for both “Petrushka” and “The Rite of Spring”), ZOFO does not flinch from such demands. For those whose expectations were set by Ravel’s original orchestral score, the performance was jaw-dropping awesome (without belaboring an overused adjective). The result was a full program that left its audience stunned and a bit joyous in the celebration of just what four hands can do on a single keyboard.
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