Shostakovich Two-Piano Jam with Other Minds

The Other Minds Festival has spread out with performances over the course of the year in various Bay Area locations, including a few ancillary events such as a two-piano recital in San Francisco's Taube Atrium Theater a couple of Sundays ago. The organization's founder, Charles Amirkhanian (above), gave his usual wry and intelligent introduction, noting that the festival's next event would be in the same theater on March 23rd when the Arditti Quartet plays the "complete microtonal pieces for strings" by Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979). "This will be your first chance to hear this music in the United States...and probably the last."

He then introduced the two pianists playing music written or adapted by Shostakovich for two pianos, Maki Namekawa and her husband Dennis Russell Davies. Namekawa is best known for her work with composer Philip Glass, while Davies has had a fascinating career in Europe conducting everything from Bruckner to Lou Harrison. In both the recent Lou Harrison biography and Philip Glass's memoirs, Davies is a major figure. "We're starting the concert with the encores," Davies explained, "because you really don't want to hear anything else after Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony on the second half of the program."

After a pair of dances that Shostakovich wrote for films, they played a two-piano reduction of Stravinsky's 1930 Symphony of Psalms written by Shostakovich for students at the Leningrad Conservatory. According to the program notes by Randall Wong, "Shostakovich thought well enough of his transcription that he personally presented the manuscript to Stravinsky during his historic 1962 visit to the Soviet Union. Shostakovich's arrangement reflects his admiration for the work in that it succeeds in preserving both the ecclesiastic ambiance and choral textures or the original. Stravinsky's reception of the score was tepid at best." Though it was beautifully played by Namekawa and Davies, I'm siding with Stravinsky on this one because the two pianos could not make up for the loss of human voices in this piece, particularly in the ethereal finale, one of Stravinsky's most strikingly beautiful stretches of music.

At intermission, it was fun drinking coffee with a celebrity, singer-composer Laurie Anderson, who was an early "discovery" of the Other Minds Festival.

Also attending were true music lovers Terence Shek and Charlie Tiee looking perfectly imperturbable as usual.

My friend James Parr and I started the afternoon with a trip to the Kimono Refashioned exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, so Ms. Namekawa's procession of gorgeous concert wear felt serendipitous. She and Davies gave a fascinating, arduous tour of Shostakovich's 1936 Fourth Symphony which the composer put in a drawer after being attacked by Stalin for his wild, modernist opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The original score of the symphony was lost and all that remained was a two-piano reduction by the composer and it wasn't until 1961 that the full piece was reconstructed from orchestral rehearsal parts and this two-piano version. In the week leading up to this concert I listened obsessively to a recording led by Vasily Petrenko of the 70+ minute symphony, and enjoyed it tremendously though it was hard to encompass the entire, sprawling work mentally. It was even more difficult absorbing the two-piano version, particularly the long first movement.

Davies introduced the work by saying that he had been part of a poll of conductors asked for their favorite three symphonies and he had picked the Shostakovich Fourth. "I was the only one who selected it, but I do feel that strongly about the work. You should really hear the whole thing." Did you hear that, SF Symphony programmers? Anne Midgette, the Washington Post music critic, wrote a rave review of Namekawa and Davies playing different two-piano repertory in 2017, and ended with this wonderful appreciation: "The performers, smiling at each other and at the music, emphasized “playing” rather than “performing,” with all the artificial earnestness that the latter entails. It was a performance given by people who cared more about the music than about what you, or I, or anybody thinks of it — a performance at once intimate and uncompromising, a concert given by two working musicians, at work." It was a pleasure to witness.