Other Minds is pleased to welcome back Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies for a recital of solo and piano four-hands music with real-time interactive projections by Cori O’Lan at Hertz Hall in Berkeley, Saturday, March 5, 2022. The centerpiece of this recital will be the U.S. premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird suite arranged for piano four hands by Dennis Russell Davies in 2015.
About his arrangement, Davies says, “The successful performances of Stravinsky’s four-hand version of The Rite of Spring with my wife Maki Namekawa, and the favorable reception of our recording, led me to the decision to take on an arrangement for four hands of The Firebird ballet from 1910. Unlike The Rite of Spring and Pétrouchka, Stravinsky’s own published piano version of L’Oiseau de feu is for solo piano. In its published form it is essentially unplayable (at least for me!) but was for me a tremendous help as I prepared my four-hand version in that I could clearly see which elements of this highly complex score were essential for him in his piano version, and I made sure to always include them in mine.”
“Many listeners have commented that hearing Stravinsky’s piano four-hand version of The Rite of Spring helped them appreciate even more the compositional values of the work without the distraction, of his ingenious orchestration. I hope sincerely that this new four-hand version of The Firebird can achieve something similar.”
The program will also include shorter solo works by Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Hania Rani, and Kurt Schwertsik (West Coast premiere) and Marc Reibel’s Sakura for piano four-hands (U.S. Premiere). Each work will be accompanied by visualized elaborated analysis of frequency spectrum, dynamics, and timings by Austrian artist Cori O’Lan.