San Francisco Classical Voice

Mills College has long been a haven for new music and a venue for the avant garde. On Friday night, two of the leading exponents of what used to be called "serious new music" — pianists Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi — showed that it is possible to play difficult contemporary works and still have fun. Each played a new work for piano and electronics by Richard Teitelbaum. And although most of the toys were on stage, it was also fun to be in the audience.

The stage was a tangle of wires, resembling a high-tech studio rather than the familiar lonely stage setting with concert grand about to be ravished. But the equipment proved ravishing at times, too, especially in the first work, …dal Niente… (1997), dedicated to the memory of Kuniharu Akiyama, the late husband of the pianist. In it, Teitelbaum "seeks to conjure the spirits of those to whom it is dedicated, as if to materialize them out the cauldron of the piano itself." The opening phrase illustrated the perils that beset such an endeavor. After drawing some unearthly sounds from inside the piano (while a gentleman in the front row was stroking the nape of the neck of the woman next to him), Takahashi seated herself at the keyboard and tried a few evocative chords, only to be rebuffed by a very uncooperative F major triad. Ah, the spirit world is tonal after all, I thought. Not true.

After exchanging puzzled looks, performer and composer/programmer restarted the computer, and the piece continued in a more appropriately ambiguous vein. Part of the success of the piece rested with the understatement of the "accompaniment" and the sense that it was responding to the varied and subtle playing of Takahashi, not the other way round.

The piece written for Ursula Oppens, Seq Transit Parammers (1999), seemed, from the two pages of program notes written by the composer, to be more technologically driven. Though a more impressive composition, it was less engaging for the listener. The piano was rotated so that the audience could see Oppens as her hands leapt from the piano keyboard to the array of buttons she had to push to start and stop the massive sounds that threatened to engulf her, all of which came from the same instrument she herself was playing. A daunting task, and it required Oppens to keep up with a piano that might make the Nancarrow studies for player piano seem tame.

In between the two Teitelbaum works were Ligeti's Three Pieces for Two Pianos and Lutoslawski's Variations on a Theme by Paganini. Oppens and Takahashi gave brilliant performances of both works, which are classics by now. The Ligeti sounded especially fascinating in the context of the other pieces on the program. The first of the Ligeti Pieces in particular shows the difficulty (and interest) of sounds that do not coincide. It provided an excellent contrast to the Lutoslawski, where all the brilliant passagework, even as delivered in the razor-sharp Oppens/Takahashi ensemble, began to pale after a while.

The evening ended with an extended improv (oxymoron?), with Chris Brown and Fred Frith from the Mills faculty added to the mix. It was either inspired or tedious, depending on your taste. I found it to be lovely though ultimately disappointing, like waiting for the theme that never comes. I did love the place where Frith seemed to charm the snake from inside his guitar. I guess you had to be there.

(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College and is a host (with Sarah Cahill) of the Berkeley TV program, Stop, Look, and Listen.)

©2000 Jerry Kuderna, all rights reserved