ZOFO Echoes Gamelan Practices

ZOFO pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi (photograph by Keith Saunders, courtesy of Old First Concerts)

This morning I was somewhat saddened to discover that I had not encountered a performance by the ZOFO duo of pianists Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi since May of 2016 until I live-streamed their latest recital in the Old First Concerts series last night. I remember when this four-hands-on-one-keyboard duo made its debut and the innovative approach they took to repertoire that subsequently followed. That approach surfaced last night with a program entitled Echoes of Gamelan.

Many readers probably know by now that gamelan refers to both a genre of traditional Indonesian music and the ensemble that performs the music, consisting primarily of metallophone instruments, augmented by hand-drums to keep the beat, and occasionally joined by vocalists, both male and female. While a piano keyboard cannot match the sonorities of those instruments, Colin McPhee, who spent much time in Bali, transcribed gamelan music for two pianos; and roughly half of last night’s program consisted of four-hand arrangements of McPhee’s efforts. The remainder of the program then involved works by recent and twentieth-century composers reflecting on gamelan practices.

Sadly, some of those reflections seemed to be rather remote, if not distorted. I have not yet come up with a good reason for why Nakagoshi’s arrangement of the “Saturn” movement from Gustav Holst’s Opus 32 suite, The Planets, was included; and the “Sirènes” movement from Claude Debussy’s collection of three orchestral nocturnes, also arranged by Nakagoshi, was similarly opaque. However, these were outliers in a program that explored how the thematic content of the gamelan repertoire could hold up under the limitations of a piano keyboard.

For the most part, the results were satisfying. Mind you, my wife and I had the good fortune to experience gamelan performances in both Java (Yogyakarta) and Bali (Ubud). These were not “concert” experiences. It would be better to say that we had the good fortune to be in the presence of music being made. This is not to say that there were not situations that involve “stage” and “audience.” However, more often than not, the music is associated with particular occasions; and it is the nature of the occasion, rather than a “concert setting,” that matters.

Nevertheless, last night’s “concert setting” made for an engaging account between traditional and contemporary practices, leaving the attentive listener with a feast of food for thought.