Conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies was born on April 16, 1944, meaning that next month he will celebrate his 80th birthday. Last night Other Minds (OM) decided to begin the celebration early with a piano recital in the Mission. The performers were Davies and his wife Maki Namekawa. The program was framed by four-hand arrangements of the first two of the six symphonic poems collected by Bedřich Smetana under the title Má vlast (my fatherland). At the center of the program, Namekawa selected four of Philip Glass’ piano études, having previously recorded all twenty of them for Orange Mountain Music. On either side of that center, Davies performed music by Laurie Anderson (“Bob & Bill”) and selections from John Cage’s “The Seasons” in his own piano transcription of the orchestral score he composed for a ballet by Merce Cunningham.
This all made for a highly satisfying evening, even if the piano itself was not quite up to snuff. Davies made it a point to observe that the four-hand arrangements of the Má vlast selections were written by the composer himself. The first selection “Vyšehrad” takes its title from the castle in Prague on the Vitava River that is known as “The High Castle.” The second selection was “Vitava;” and it is better known by its English title, “The Moldau” (which is the German name of the river). Smetana endowed both of these selections with rich orchestral instrumentation. The keyboard version, on the other hand, brings attention to the polyphonic “spinal cord,” which is then “fleshed out” by orchestration. The attentive listener is in a better position to appreciate how thematic material is introduced and then elaborated, and last night’s performances definitely had that attentive listener in mind!
Davies’ performance of Cage basically accounted for the first half of the entire score. Those were the Indian perspectives on winter (quiescence) and spring (creation), each of which began with a prelude. The music itself would subsequently become a point of departure for Cage’s only string quartet (performed here one week ago by the Calder Quartet), which reconceived not only the music itself but also the ordering of the season movements. This was an early (1947) Cage composition, while “Bob & Bill” was one of Anderson’s more “mature” works. The latter was clearly a very personal work; but, in the absence of much knowledge of those personalities, the music had little impact on my own listening experience.
Glass composed twenty études in two books of ten each. Namekawa played two études from each of the two books, beginning with the third and seventh in the first book. This was followed by the first and last études in the second book, numbered eleven and twenty. Glass’ own observations suggest that these were very personal undertakings. Nevertheless, like the many études of the past, what matters most is focused execution. Namekawa’s presentation last night definitely reflected the qualities of her recording; but there was also a sense of personality behind the music, which can only be appreciated in the immediacy of the performance itself.
Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies (from the Other Minds program book, photograph by David Magnusson)
On a more personal note, I have to say that, in the photograph of Namekawa and Davies at the keyboard in the program book (shown above), Davies bore a striking resemblance to my doctoral thesis advisor Marvin Minsky. While Minsky is best known as one of the “founding fathers” of artificial intelligence, he was also a serious music student; and at least one of his compositions was performed in recital. I owe bassist Shinji Eshima considerable thanks for providing me with the program for that performance (at which Eshima’s music was also performed). Mind you, I doubt that Davies was ever mistaken for Minsky over the course of his career as either a pianist or a conductor!
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