When I first encountered ZOFO, the “20FingerOrchestra” of pianists Keisuke Nakagoshi and Eva-Maria Zimmermann, about a year ago in the Osher Salon of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, only one of the three works on their program was explicitly conceived as four-hand piano music. Last night they returned to the Conservatory, performing this time in the Recital Hall and offering a new program of five works, only two of which were better known as orchestral pieces. Of the remaining three, two were relatively recent efforts, composed by the Estonian Urmas Sisask and the Japanese Tomohiro Moriyama.
Sisask was represented by “The Milky Way,” composed in 1990 and one of several works inspired by his interest in astronomy. Of particular note is that the “twenty fingers” are not confined to the keyboard for their performance, exploring new sonorities by also both striking and plucking the strings. The piece may be approached as a meditation on the relation between Man and the Cosmos. Man is represented by a chant-like monodic line, often paralleled at one or more octaves. The Cosmos, on the other hand, is the full body of the piano itself with its vast diversity of sounds, none of which have anything to do with Man’s incantation. There is something chilling in the prospect that Man can do little more than repeat, only getting louder and introducing more parallel octaves; and the Cosmos never acknowledges any of this activity. There is some sense of the persistence found in Charles’ Ives “The Unanswered Question;” but, where Ives settles into serene acknowledgement, Sisask seems to dwell on Man’s recognition of and frustration with his own insignificance. Nakagoshi and Zimmerman were perfectly adept in shifting focus between keyboard and the strings themselves, providing an execution of this bleak work through which its stark poignancy emerged with frightening clarity.
Moriyama’s approach, which he composed in 2006, was more playful, beginning with his title, “Let’s play a duet!” This work was given its world premiere by the piano duo of Kuni Seo and Shinichiro Kato when they won the 10th Murray Dranoff International Two Piano Competition in October of 2006 in Miami. Writing for the Miami Herald, Lawrence Budmen describe the work as a satire on György Ligeti’s etudes; but, since Ligeti was never shy about his own playful streak, it might be better to say that Moriyama took Ligeti’s prankishness to a higher level. The work seems to be as much about choreographing an intricate series of hand and arm crossings as it is about negotiating its motivic sprays of atonal clusters. Nakagoshi and Zimmerman delivered a highly focused performance through which all the musical and physical details were precisely executed. Through their deadpan intensity the humor of Moriyama’s pranks (and perhaps Ligeti’s inspirations) blossomed into an outlandish flower of a performance.
The third work composed for four-hand piano was much earlier, Alfredo Casella’s Opus 27 Pupazzetti. Composed in 1915 this suite of five pieces was inspired by Petrushka, Igor Stravinsky’s second collaboration with the choreographer Mikhail Fokine for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The title page describes the pieces as easy (“facili”); but there is nothing easy about the breakneck pace required for the march and polka of the outer movements. Like Petrushka these pieces depict puppets in a style that emphasizes the grotesque; and those grotesqueries were executed with a delivery that was particularly appropriate for a pre-Halloween concert.
ZOFO opened their recital with Pupazzetti, coupling it with Stravinsky’s own four-hand version of Petrushka for the first half of the program. This selection also nicely complemented last year’s recital that featured the four-hand version of The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky completed before the orchestral score. As I observed of that performance, “the four-hand version gives a clearer statement of Stravinsky’s own conception of what was foreground and what was background” in the thick complexity of myriad “polyphonic voices distributed over a wide orchestral palette.” From this point of view, Stravinsky’s approach to Petrushka was not quite as successful.
This may be appreciated through his relationship with Fokine. One might almost say that Fokine was responsible for Stravinsky becoming the composer that the world would later remember for The Rite of Spring, even if Fokine had no hand in that later ballet. Had Fokine selected another Russian folktale, like the one for his Firebird ballet, Stravinsky might have been known only as another Russian composer with a distinctive take on folk sources; but Fokine’s conception of Petrushka confronted Stravinsky with an entirely new set of challenges. Stravinsky rose to the occasion with consummate skill; and the rest, as they say, is history.
Most important is that, following a tradition that can be traced back at least to Alexander Pushkin, Fokine seemed less interested in the narrative of a puppet endowed with human consciousness than he was in capturing the context of the spirit of the Russian people in which that narrative was embedded. That context is, ironically enough, Pushkin’s own time. The year is 1830 (that year is given explicitly in Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets); and the setting is a public square in St. Petersburg during the pre-Lenten carnival. In the opening and closing scenes, the square is packed with people from every sector of Russian society; and Fokine portrayed them all in almost anthropological detail. This is not a ballet that anyone can see only once. Too many things are always happening, and they are taking place in every corner of the set.
The genius of Stravinsky’s composition came from his ability to capture in music every detail of Fokine’s choreography. When two street entertainers are performing simultaneously, each straining for more public attention (and more coins left in the hat), that simultaneity also emerges in Stravinsky’s score, without ever letting go of the hustle and bustle of the crowd that cannot decide whom to watch. As a result there is less attention to sorting out foreground from background that would emerge in The Rite of Spring, because, in the world that Fokine had conceived, everything is in the foreground! Stravinsky gave Fokine exactly what Fokine wanted; and by doing so he engaged in his first venture into surface-level chaos that would change his entire approach to composition.
Needless to say, reducing all of this to the limitations of four hands is virtually impossible. When Stravinsky himself prepared a suite of excerpts for solo piano, he had the luxury of selecting portions that would demand virtuosity without escaping the realm of possibility. Taken in its entirety, the score for the ballet is not as forgiving; but one can imagine that this could have been the version used for many of Fokine’s rehearsals. Thus, almost all the necessary cues emerge in the right place at the right time; so the dancers will know how to take those same cues from the orchestra in the pit. As a recital piece, however, this is a transcription better appreciated by those familiar with the ballet, as opposed to the Rite transcription, which almost serves as a “listener’s guide” to the full orchestral version.
Within the context of those limitations, however, Nakagoshi and Zimmerman delivered a stunning performance. While they followed Stravinsky’s lead in deleting the final scene of Petrushka’s death (on the grounds that its musical language was more limited than that of the rest of the score), all of Fokine’s other details emerged with all of the requisite rich “local color.” Fokine’s spirit received as much honor in death as Stravinsky had granted the man himself in life.
The ZOFO program concluded with Léon Roques’ four-hand transcription of Paul Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Thanks to Walt Disney this is a representation of a narrative far more familiar than that of Fokine’s Petrushka. Dukas was as meticulous in capturing that narrative in 1897 as Stravinsky would be in 1911; but Dukas’ narrative had less attention to the wealth of detail that occupied Fokine, primarily because his source was a ballad in fourteen doggerel-rich stanzas by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. As originally composed this work was richly orchestrated; but Nakagoshi and Zimmerman still conveyed the vividness of the narrative in Roques’ transcription, providing a delightful conclusion to an evening rich in perspectives of what twenty fingers could do with a single piano.
Comments