2 Pianists in Supple, Flowing Dialogue

By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: July 26, 2009
Classical music has been treated as a poor relation at the Lincoln Center Festival in recent summers, but this year the tally was down to one: a program of contemporary works for two pianos performed by Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, the next-to-last night of the festival. Lincoln Center apparently considered even that much to be heavy lifting. The concert was presented as a collaboration with the Ruhr Piano Festival in Germany, which commissioned the works by Chen Yi and Philip Glass that made up the second half of the program.
Mr. Davies, though best known as a conductor, is also a fine pianist, and he has been playing duo recitals with Ms. Namekawa since 2003. A memorable concert at the Miller Theater in 2005 was also devoted to modern music, but their repertory includes Zemlinsky’s four-hand arrangements of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” They have recorded both, and a contemporary American program, for the Ruhr festival’s label, Edition Klavier-Festival Ruhr.

Mr. Davies and Ms. Namekawa began with a lively account of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos (1935), a work Stravinsky composed for his own use in duo concerts with one of his sons, Soulima. He kept it eminently practical: by arguing that the orchestra parts that might normally be expected in a concerto were incorporated into the keyboard fabric, he guaranteed the work’s portability. And by couching it in Neo-Classical gestures and textures, he made it accessible and appealing, if not quite as sharp-edged as his most enduring work.
Its charms include a rhythmically vital opening movement and inventive variations, and Mr. Davies and Ms. Namekawa gave it a supple performance with a hint of modernist steeliness in its closing fugue. They ended the first half of their program with another, more recent oldie, Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase” (1967), an early experiment in applying to instrumental music the phasing techniques that Mr. Reich discovered in his seminal tape pieces, “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain.”

The idea is that two musicians playing brief, simple figures begin in unison and then move apart one beat at a time. Eventually they return to the positions from which they began, but along the way the displaced beats create an increasingly dense web of sound from which phantom themes emerge and interact. Or at least, they seem to: Mr. Reich’s real discovery here is the power of the overtone series and of psychoacoustic effects. In his phase pieces we hear rhythms and counterpoint that no one is actually playing.
Ms. Chen’s “China West Suite” (2007) is more straightforward. In a fanfarelike introduction and three longer movements, Ms. Chen elaborates on Meng, Zang and Miao traditional themes. A listener did not have to know the themes to be seduced by them, and Ms. Chen’s settings turn them into flowing dialogues between the pianists. Particularly striking were the stately opening of the “Meng Songs” movement and the rhythmic pointedness of the dance in the finale.

Mr. Glass employs an amusing trick in his Four Movements (2008). The first three begin in musical worlds that you would not readily identify as Mr. Glass’s, but after a few introductory moments, the Glassian hallmarks begin to pile up. The opening movement, for example, starts with a Lisztian rumble. The second sounds like middle-period Beethoven and the third is steeped in Bartok.
But arpeggiation, gracefully winding chromatic figures (particularly in the first movement), a syncopated chord figure that appears in many earlier works and even a few specific harmonic progressions all find their way into the music, making its authorship unquestionable.

In the finale Mr. Glass drops the allusions to other composers entirely and goes directly to his trademark figuration, which Mr. Davies and Ms. Namekawa, both expert in this music, play with clarity and energy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/arts/music/27davies.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss