Duo rev up powerful new ‘Engine’
The repertoire of music for two pianos is a strange and craggy landscape, in which a pair of musical behemoths simultaneously collaborate and compete for space. The magisterial duo recital given in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Thursday, Nov. 1, by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich not only introduced a new denizen of that artistic world but also helpfully situated it in context for their listeners.
The new piece is “Keyboard Engine,” a densely wrought 25-minute creation by the 84-year-old British composer Harrison Birtwistle. He wrote it for the duo this year on a commission that included Cal Performances — the presenter
of Thursday’s recital — and the composition emerged as a daunting, potentially fascinating work that hinted at richer splendors than it quite revealed on a single hearing.
What proved helpful was not only the thunderous, resilient force of the performers — which came through even in Zellerbach’s rather cavernous acoustics — but also the ingenuity with which they built the program around the premiere. The evening began with relatively modest but tricky curtain-raisers by Bartók and Ravel, and concluded after intermission with Messiaen’s capacious “Visions de l’Amen,” which shares with the Birtwistle a sense of scale and intensity.
All of these pieces cast a certain reflective light on the evening’s centerpiece, which unfolded over a formal path that felt at once highly structured and unpredictable. “Keyboard Engine” is sectional in nature, with crisply delineated transitions marking the end of one idea and the beginning of the next.
At first, this effect feels discursive, as if Birtwistle were simply throwing ideas in the direction of the audience one after another. But soon you begin to recognize familiar landmarks — a stretch of aggressively isolated single notes, for instance, or a swingy rhythm that chugs along like a blurred and overwritten waltz — and realize that the composer has gone back repeatedly to re-examine a few basic themes.
The overarching metaphor of a whirring, clacking machine helps illuminate the music’s rhythmic force, which often chugs along with a sort of demonic momentum, but has less to say about the heavily encrusted harmonic language that Birtwistle uses. For that, Messiaen’s writing — similarly intricate and gaudy but more content to show its tonal underpinnings — proved a useful reference point.
“Visions de l’Amen,” written in 1943, is one of the composer’s characteristically expansive celebrations of celestial glory and earthly eroticism; it bristles with huge numbers of notes, but underneath them sits an almost straightforward parable. The seven-movement piece reaches a climax at the end, when a wonderfully corny melody is adorned with huge amounts of weighty filigree, like a Christmas carol almost buried in golden snowflakes.
Between the straightforwardness of the openers — excerpts from Bartók’s “Mikrokosmos” followed by Ravel’s short “Sites auriculaires” — and the massive Baroque architecture of the Messiaen, one could triangulate a path into Birtwistle’s new piece. The fervor and clarity of the duo’s playing only underscored the desire to get to know the music further.
The metaphor whirring, overarching clacking of a machine helps illuminate the music’s rhythmic force, which often chugs along with a sort of demonic momentum.