As I announced last week, the ZOFO Duet (Keisuke Nakagoshi and Eva-Maria Zimmermann) used their slot in today’s Piano Month recital in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral to preview the CD they are currently recording at Skywalker Studios in Marin for the Sono Luminus label. Most of the time of the recital was taken by one of the two major works to be featured on this CD: the four-hand version of the score for the ballet The Rite of Spring, which Igor Stravinsky completed before the orchestral score and which he performed with Claude Debussy to introduce the music to choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. (The other major work on the CD will be Harold Shapero’s four-hand sonata.)
Stravinsky’s four-hand version of this famous (and notorious) ballet is almost always an informative experience for those who have only heard the orchestral version. When I reviewed its performance at ZOFO’s first public concert on October 30, 2009, I reinforced this point as follows:
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.
Almost two years later ZOFO’s interpretation continues to be an inspiring listening experience, letting us in on the creative process that resulted in one of the most important compositions of the twentieth century.
By way of a warm-up, Nakagoshi and Zimmerman began their recital with a four-hand arrangement of Leonard Bernstein’s overture to his musical, Candide, prepared from the orchestral score by Charlie Harmon in 1993. Having just come away from a generous helping of nineteenth-century opera, I realized that the structure of this overture owes far more to Gioachino Rossini and (at least by indirection) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart than it does to any of the leading composers of American musicals, such as George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, or Oscar Hammerstein. It is as elegant in structure as it is playful in rhetoric, citing only a few of the tunes to come while always driving forward at a lively pace. Harmon’s transcription captures all of that sense of play without ever shortchanging the structural foundations, and ZOFO’s execution was sheer delight.
ZOFO also spared a few minutes for an encore (while the final measures of Stravinsky’s score will just dying out in the Old Saint Mary’s sanctuary). They performed “Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d’été” (to invoke Pan, god of the summer wind), the first of the six Épigraphes Antiques by Debussy. This restored calm in the wake of the ritual suicide that concludes The Rite of Spring, and ZOFO performed it with minimalist delicacy. The complete set will be part of the CD when it is released, and the work is well worth serious listening when performed in its entirety.
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