Imbrie’s To My Son, a brief, attractive piano piece, opened the concert. It was composed only a few months ago as a birthday present, and played with graceful simplicity by Takahashi. Another duet by Imbrie, Mukashi Mukashi for two pianos, ended the program. It was composed in 1996 and played by its dedicatees, Takahashi and Rae Imamura. The title, meaning “Once Upon a Time,” reflects Imbrie’s experience of Japan and the Japanese language, which he was trained to translate in the U.S. Army during World War II.

For a year in the 1960s, he and his wife, Barbara, lived in Japan, and he “came away with what is no doubt a romanticized image of the landscape, people, and culture.” Fragments of Japanese-sounding music are threaded through the score. Lively interactions subside toward the end, leading to a passage of broadly sustained harmonies and a quiet, thoughtful close.

There were three more pieces to be heard on this rather full program, the most arresting of which was Toru Takemitsu’s Piano Distance (1961). Characteristically for him, this was an introspective work of stark contrasts. An edgy, expressionistic intensity underlay the static, almost ritualistic, musical rhetoric, and Takahashi gave it a clear, spirited, and deeply emotive performance.

Hi Kyung Kim is a former student and now a colleague of Andrew Imbrie’s who teaches at UC Santa Cruz. Her Crystal Drops, composed in 2003 for Takahashi and Imamura, had the two pianists trading high, rapidly glittering passages in the brightly jewel-like first and third movements. The slow, sparse middle movement was a meditation influenced by news of the 2001 World Trade Center bombings. Piercingly insistent repeated notes at the top of the piano and harsh, isolated tone clusters at midrange created an eerily somber mood, briefly recollected at the end of the last movement. The two pianists gave a sympathetic account of this strong but delicate music.

Michio Mamiya’s When Houses Were Alive (2002), for narrator and solo piano, was a departure, in style and intention, from the rest of the program. It used a text based on Inuit folklore, accompanied by simple, folk-derived piano music that was intended to enhance the text or provide contrast and a change of pace. In this performance, narrator Bonnie Wade’s reticent presentation did not project the words strongly enough. In fact she was barely audible and could have used some amplification.

Though Takahashi played her part with obvious commitment, much of the music seemed naive and arbitrary and not really suited to the text. Whether a unifying element of style was missing from the performance, or the piece suffered from being placed among so many examples of sophisticated modernism, is hard to say. Its contextual strangeness suggests that music, even more than the other performing arts, needs a sympathetic environment in order to thrive.

(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)

©2006 Jules Langert, all rights reserved