On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer.
Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in Albania in the 1970s, and includes over its approximately 45 minute duration evocations of Albanian bagpipes (which is how the piece starts), Albanian Communist “anthems,” folksongs, and dances. On both evenings it was engaging and enjoyable and rousing. The performances were completely compelling.
The first concert began with Smith playing three quite substantial works. On the Virtues of Flowers, a half hour long piece, celebrates the therapeutic and restorative powers of flowers as part of a treatment of hospital patients, and was written for a concert by John Tilbury to mark the 30th anniversary of a hospital of the West Sussex Health Authority. The sort of jazzy meditative music which begins and ends the work frames what might be described as post minimalist fast and flashy material. The other two works on the concert were shorter and possibly more dynamic pieces, which were originally intended as parts of a set (Smith has written a number of evening long sequences of sorter pieces which he calls piano concerts), that he says “never materialized.” Nails is forceful and hard as. All This and Less came together as a reaction to a review of a concert of music by friends and associates of Smith’s by Nicholas Kenyon in the Financial Times in 1979: “Satie without the wit; Ravel without the grace; Cage without the silence; Rakhmaninov without the tunes: the recent music of Gavin Bryars and John White is all this, and less.”
The second evening’s concert began with Smith playing fourteen pieces from his First Piano Concert. The Concert was a reaction to the more than one hundred tangos that were written by many composers, including Smith, for the Tango Project of Yvar Mikhashoff. Hearing one of Mikhashoff’s “Tango Marathons” at the Almeida Festival in 1985, Smith thought that “it was apparent that many of the featured composers had not seriously engaged with any form of tango.” In reaction he wrote a set of 24 pieces for piano, each 3 to 4 minutes long, each one “relating to specific musical genres or piano playing styles, western or non-western, well-known or obscure, real or imagined.” The fourteen played on this concert included as well as a tango and a bossa nova, a Charleston, a Calypso, and Hokey Cokey, and some vaguer forms: Afterhours, Nocturne, and Avash Avash (which is an arrangement of a section of Albanian Summer.) Smith’s playing in both evenings was powerful and satisfying.
Both of the concerts were, to put it one way, well attended, or, to put it another way, mobbed; and both were full of the joviality that one would expect from a birthday party. So not only did they offer the opportunity to experience a sizable and satisfying sampling of a serious and impressive composer’s work, they also were a festive celebration of that composer’s accomplishments.
