Today’s Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral by the ZOFO (20FingerOrchestra) piano duet of Keisuke Nakagoshi and Eva-Maria Zimmermann provided me with the valuable opportunity of revisiting a composition that I had heard the very first time I attended one of their recitals, back in October of 2009. The composition was a sonata for four hands on one piano keyboard composed by Harold Shapero in 1941, which he first performed with Leonard Bernstein. Writing about this sonata at that time, I was impressed by Shapero’s own take on an “American sound” (which differentiated him from contemporaries such as Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Roger Sessions); but I also suggested that the overall nature of the sonata was “never particularly adventurous.”
Today I learned the value of multiple exposures to the unfamiliar. There was clearly more adventure than I had detected upon my first encounter, but I should not have been surprised that the second time was a different experience. Any first encounter cannot avoid the problem of figuring out where to direct attention (unless, of course, the work is composed with such blatantly bold strokes that attention can only be oriented in one direction). For the serious listener, every return to a composition is an opportunity for discovery; and, for this sonata, there were actually many of those opportunities.
Shapero’s bold use of open intervals still contributed to his own version of an “American sound;” and he engaged those intervals in ways that always seemed to feed off of the resonant qualities of the piano’s sonorities. However, perhaps because I was observing the execution of the score more closely, I realized the extent to which the parts of the two pianists were seamlessly integrated. Indeed, the pianists assumed the role of a couple that knew each other so well that each was always completing the other’s sentences. It may be worth speculating whether Shapero had this sort of intellectual relationship with Bernstein; but the way in which he captured that relationship in music, regardless of its origins, was nothing less than stunning. Of equal interest was the overall architecture, which never dispensed with traditional forms but always seemed to endow them with a unique twist consistent with the rhetorical tone of the melodic and harmonic content. All of these aspects of the score were executed with impeccable clarity by ZOFO, and who knows how many more such elements remain to be discovered?
Maurice Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole is probably best known as an orchestral suite. However, it was first composed as a piano duet in 1907; and the third “Habanera” movement was composed in 1895. Ravel was particularly sensitive about this latter date, because of accusations (clearly false) that he had plagiarized from Claude Debussy. The orchestration of the piano duet was not completed until March 1908. Beyond Ravel’s gift for capturing Spanish idioms in each of the four movements of this suite, what is perhaps most striking is the way in which a simple motif of four stepwise descending tones becomes an idée fixe that pervades all four movements. This is the principle theme of the opening movement, entitled “Prélude à la nuit;” and its reappearance lends a nocturnal quality to the entire composition. This differentiates Ravel’s use of the technique from the more obsessive qualities engaged by Hector Berlioz in his Opus 14 “Symphonie fantastique.” In the orchestral version this “theme of the night” peregrinates from one instrument to another. However, because of the more limited sonorities, the piano version requires more subtlety of execution; and ZOFO seemed to home in on how the presence of that theme could be felt without any sense of it being intrusive.
The program began with eight of the sixteen waltzes from the Opus 39 collection of Johannes Brahms. These were not played in Brahms’ order, and the waltz chosen to open the set also concluded it. I have to confess that I have always thought that Brahms had endowed Opus 39 with a coherent overall architecture that was not particularly conducive to modification and was probably downright averse to it. On a waltz-by-waltz basis ZOFO certainly recognized the striking diversity of rhetorical styles across the individual pieces; and each was executed to place its characteristic nature in the best of light. Nevertheless, I was not convinced that the revised ordering made for much of a journey through the collection; but that may just be because I am so used to the logic of Brahms’ original version.
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