Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford Release New CD

Pianist Satoko Fujii has not released a duo recording with Myra Melford (also a pianist) since their 2007 debut album, Under the Water. This was back when I was a researcher for a Fuji Xerox outpost created in the outskirts of Palo Alto. I had already accumulated a rather massive collection of CD recordings, and one of the first things I did to establish my return from Singapore to the United States was to purchase subscriptions for both the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony.

Not long after my arrival, I first became aware of the Center for New Music. Unless I am mistaken, one of the first concerts I attended was a solo piano performance by Satoko Fujii when she was visiting from Japan. As a result of that encounter, I began to take an interest in her recordings; and, while I am not sure that I have acquired all of them, I know that my current collection is definitely a generous one.

A duo piano performance by Myra Melford (left) and Satoko Fujii (right) (from the press release for their new Katarahi album)

This coming Friday will see the release of Fujii’s second duo album with Melford. This time the title is Japanese, Katarahi, which. according to the advance material I received, is “a heart-to-heart conversation between intimate friends.” To be fair, I have rarely (if ever) found intimacy to be conveyed through a recording. For that matter, as can be seen in the above photograph, I am not sure that such a conveyance can be sustained across the length of a grand piano, particularly when it involves two pianos conjoined!

That said, there is an engaging diversity of sonorities, involving both the keyboards and the interiors of the respective pianos. In that context, however, I must confess that I would have preferred a video account of this performance to the audio version. The metaphor of conversation is more likely to engage the listener through a visual experience, rather than an auditory one. Nevertheless, since most of my listening is limited to perception through my ears, I sometimes enjoy the liberty of dreaming up my own visual experience. Each of the seven tracks on this new album has its own way of helping me conjure up such dreams!