The ZOFO duet (Keisuke Nakagoshi and Eva-Maria Zimmermann) gave its first public concert on October 30, 2009 in the Osher Salon of the San Francisco Conservatory of music. They will now be able to celebrate this inaugural event with a CD of the works performed that evening under a contract with the Grammy Award winning Sono Luminus label. Recording will take place in August at the state-of-the-art Skywalker Studios in Marin.
The CD will be entitled MIND MELD: Two Composers Share the Bench. The title refers to what was probably the most interesting offering at that inaugural concert, the four-hand sonata composed by Harold Shapero in 1941, first performed by Shapero and his fellow Harvard student Leonard Bernstein. This “other composer at the bench” will also be represented by a four-hand transcription of the overture he composed for the musical Candide.
If the Shapero sonata was the most interesting part of the program, because it has received so little attention, then the most ambitious part was the performance of the four-hand version of The Rite of Spring, which Igor Stravinsky completed before the orchestral score. This music is probably about as well-known as Shapero’s sonata is little-known. However, as I wrote about that ZOFO performance, the four-hand version had much to offer the serious listener:
This score is so rich in polyphonic voices distributed over such a wide orchestral palette that it is hard to imagine any piano reduction doing justice to it; but, at the very least, the four-hand version gives a clearer statement of Stravinsky's own conception of what was foreground and what was background in all of that complexity. In other words the piano version provides some level of simplifying abstraction, which the curious listener can use as a "stepping stone" in learning how to negotiate all of the orchestral levels of detail. For this reason alone ZOFO has done the community of listeners a great service by providing a new path for appreciation of one of the most important musical compositions of the twentieth century.
Finally, the CD will include the opening work from that 2009 recital, Claude Debussy’s four-hand version of six of his twelve musical reflections on the Chansons de Bilitis poems by Pierre Louys, originally scored for two flutes, two harps, and celesta. In addition the CD will receive a “preview performance” in the Noontime Concerts™ series on August 23rd at 12:30 PM in Old St. Mary's Cathedral (660 California Street at the corner of Grant). This concert will take place in the middle of the recording session dates, so the program will feature excerpts from the new CD.
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