Thursday Night at Ojai: Two Pianos

The 61st Ojai Music Festival opened last night.  Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams, returning after their success two years ago in their performances of Nancarrow, gave us a great survey of modern works for two pianos with works by Stravinsky, Ligeti, Sciarrino, and this season’s featured composer, Peter Eötvös.  (Us amateurs have trouble coming to a decision as to the best mispronounciation of his name.)  But let me start with the featured composer, glad I can write the name and not try to speak it.

The second half of the program opened with his Cricketmusic (1970) a tape of cricket sounds, the perfect opening for an evening performance at Ojai.  This moved directly to the two pianists playing his Kosmos (1961, 1999 rev.), for which the Soviet space flights inspired the teenaged composer.  Yes, it’s a young work, but it’s good stuff and it was given a vibrant performance in which two pianos had been positioned in the front corners of the Ojai stage so that we could hear the space as well as the notes.  The pianists moved back to center stage for a performance of Ligeti‘s masterful Three Pieces for Two Pianos (1976), making the extremely difficult seem effortless.  The second of the pieces is his Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the Background), his homage to the Americans whose work he had discovered.  (His eventual discovery of Nancarrow’s work seems obvious in the first piece, Monument, with its layers of different time intervals.)

In the first half of the program Bugallo and Williams performed two of Stravinsky’s versions for two pianos of his own works for ensemble.  The first work was Septet (1953), written when he was beginning to form his own interpretations of twelve-tone concepts heard in so much of the music he heard at Ojai and at the fore-runner of LA’s Monday Evening Concerts.  Bach and Schoenberg don’t co-exists that easily in the work, but it’s interesting to hear his exploration.  Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1966) came next:  a work that’s a study of as many variations as possible of ornaments, a work providing a sweet between the two works of Stravinsky.  And then the Stravinsky “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto (1938) in its two-piano version, a masterpiece in that version as well as in the instrumental one.  Bugallo and Williams have recorded six of Stravinsky’s two-piano works, and I recommend the CD to any fan of Stravinsky or of duo pianos, Stravinsky in Black and White.  It’s not merely that the works are given good performances by two pianists who seem to inhabit each other’s piano shapings; the works give you a different view of Stravinsky and his creativity.  The architecture of the work seems much clearer in the piano versions, and it’s fun to think of how Stravinsky, the expert instrumentalist, would use the colors of other instruments.  (And of course their recording of Nancarrow is worth having.)

The concert closed with a performance of Ligeti’s Poeme Symphonique, the famously infamous work for 100 metronomes.  For the Ojai performance the metronomes were positioned in nine groups (I think because the ones I could see had 11 each) around the audience, with an amplifier for each cluster.  At first there was a lot of conversation, but the talkers gradually got more of the spirit of things.  By the time the work was down to about a dozen metronomes, the audience was paying attention, listening to the patterns.  The trail-off from five down to one, then to zero was fun.  It was much more enjoyable than watching the video on YouTube.