Piano Sonata by Philip Glass Performed by Maki Namekawa
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CAP UCLA in association with Ars Electronica, Linz Presents PIANO SONATA BY PHILIP GLASS PERFORMED BY MAKI NAMEKAWA Sun, Jan 10 at 3PM PST Prerecorded Live at Ars Electronica, Linz ART MATTERS NOW MORE THAN EVER WELCOME TO UCLA’S CENTER FOR THE ART OF PERFORMANCE UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) is the public facing research and presenting organization for the performing arts at the University of California, Los Angeles—one of the world’s leading public research universities. We are housed within the UCLA School of the Arts & Architecture along with the Hammer and Fowler museums. The central pursuit of our work as an organization is to sustain the diversity of contemporary performing artists while celebrating their contributions to culture. We acknowledge, amplify and support artists through major presentations, commissions and creative development initiatives. Our programs offer audiences a direct connection to the ideas, perspectives and concerns of living artists. Through the lens of dance, theater, music, literary arts, digital media arts and collaborative disciplines, informed by diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, artists and audiences come together in our theaters and public spaces to explore new ways of seeing that expands our understanding of the world we live in now. cap.ucla.edu #CAPUCLA CAP UCLA Presents PIANO SONATA BY PHILIP GLASS PERFORMED BY MAKI NAMEKAWA Sun, Jan 10 at 3PM PST Prerecorded Live at Ars-Electronica, Linz Approximate run time: 60 minutes, no intermission MOZART CAMARGO GUARNIERI (1907-1993) Sonatina No. 3 in G-clef (1937) ALBAN BERG (1885-1935) Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907-1908) GYÖRGY LIGETI (1923-2006) Musica Ricercata PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937) Piano Sonata (2019) Funds provided by the Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director’s Discretionary Fund. Thank you to Jim Woodard (General Manager at the Days and Nights Festival: Philip Glass Center) and Ars-Electronica, Linz. MESSAGE FROM THE CENTER When Philip Glass mentioned to me a few years ago that he was working on a piano sonata (his first!), I instinctively sensed that this was going to be a big deal. Not because a new composition by Philip Glass generally is, but because of his exuberance for it: “Hey! Did I tell you I’m working on a piano sonata?!” For all I knew, he committed himself to the idea in that exact instant, or, more likely, he had been working away on it in his mind while we were talking about a range of other topics over our bowls of soup. Whichever the case, he was excited by the journey he was embarking upon. Phil has written sonatas for other instruments before, but this would be his first for the piano. I imagined how much he would pour into it given that the piano is the instrument he has spent a lifetime playing (at home and on countless tours). However, Phil is not an artist to let the potential of a ‘first’ be tethered to what is known. His exuberance came from writing something that would far surpass what he could play, or be able to entirely hear on the instrument itself beyond imagining it as the composer. There would need to be someone who could bring the music to life and bridge the musical space between themselves, the audience and the composer. Phil composed his Piano Sonata for Maki Namekawa and Maki collaborated on its shape and dimensionality by adding her tremendous capacity and insight as a pianist. They sent recordings and adjustments back and forth across the Atlantic, and Phil describes her contribution as much more than a facile pianist interpreting the material, but adding to it in order that it can be heard and embodied. Many will recall an epic week in 2013 when CAP UCLA presented a survey of Philip Glass works at Royce Hall that included La Belle et La Bete, Music in Twelve Parts and his Complete Etudes. The week offered towering elevations, with an audience experiencing countless intakes of breath on so many levels and for me, experiencing Maki play Phil’s Etude #20 is forever lodged in my being. I have little doubt that I was not alone in my astonishment. As you experience the concert as given by Maki – there is something undeniably present about the current moment we are living in, and an incredible point of connection to the future that arrives in the third movement. There is far more consonance in the music than dissonance, and Philip Glass has put a great deal of faith into our evolving capacity to listen and hear. We recognize the piano, the structure of the sounds and the notes in time – but the speed of change and harmony is almost unimaginable. Hearing what we perhaps could not have been able to until now, is the gift of their work. We originally scheduled the concert to take place on the Royce Hall stage, which has served as one of Philip Glass’s many ‘creative homes’ over the decades. Throughout this pandemic we have had to invent previously unconsidered approaches for fortifying our commitment to artists and audiences in supporting our continuity together. No small feat within a global pandemic, with our borders closed and our stages dormant. As the US administration stopped all visas, as the devastating heave of the virus expanded, we had to find another way. I want to thank Maki and my team at CAP UCLA, and especially also Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director and CEO of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria for the truly generous collaboration in filming the Piano Sonata just before the new COVID-19 restrictions took hold in Europe. My gratitude to Philip Glass runs deep and long. For his immense humanity, perspective and music. For me, it is like light finding its way through all of the cracks in the seams and is forever arriving. Thank you for joining us. Kristy Edmunds Executive & Artistic Director ABOUT THE PROGRAM PHILIP GLASS’S FIRST PIANO SONATA “The biggest thing with new music is how to realize it. It’s an issue of how to write it down but it’s also about how to actually play it.“ –Philip Glass In late-June 2019 Glass discussed his First Piano Sonata and talked about his relationship to the piece and to Maki Namekawa as the soloist. His assertion is that any music which is truly new or original has to confront two big issues: notation and performance practice. The Piano Sonata is a piece “bursting with ideas.” These are ideas which in the first run-throughs of the piece see- med totally unconnected. Emerging through time, both Glass and Namekawa together began to understand how those ideas are connected. Glass stated, “The piece is too difficult for me to play. I can play some of it, sing some of it. But I won’t really know what it sounds like until someone like Maki performs it.” The challenge of the piece became about the a process for both the com- poser and the performer to understand it. Glass and Namekawa started the process of working on the piece together while on tour in Spain in May of 2019. Namekawa says, “This has been a journey for me with Philip on this piece, a musical journey.” When Glass was asked what the piece was about, he said “The big idea of the piece is how to play the piece.” Namekawa says at one point Glass told her that the left and the right hands have different personalities, which turned out to be a big part of unlocking the piece for her. In the third movement of the Sonata, she had been playing different tempos, but when she found these personalities for each of her hands, the piece emerged and she immediately said, “It worked!” The new ideas in the First Piano Sonata are very much about this process. What the composer and performer were going through in Barcelona and New York was “absolutely necessary” as part of the creation of the piece and it has very little to do with the notes on paper, but rather with how the piece reveals itself to the creators (composer and performer) and ultimately the audience. Glass ended by saying, “Maki is in the soup with me in discovering what the piece itself is. Musical material is bouncing in between movements and we need to find what needs to happen to put the piece together. What seem like a bunch of funny things at first become parts that pull the piece together. Familiarity breeds understanding. We ourselves are only beginning to under- stand. It’s great that it’s someone like Maki. We can discover and say “This is how it’s supposed to go.” ABOUT THE ARTISTS Maki Namekawa is a leading figure among today’s pianists, bringing to audiences’ at- tention contemporary music by international composers. As a soloist and a chamber musician equally at home in classical and repertoire of our time, she performs regularly at international venues such as Suntory Hall Tokyo, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center New York, Davies Symphony Hall San Francisco, Barbican Center and Cadogan Hall London, Cité de la Musique Paris, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Salzburg Festival, Ars Electronica Linz, Musik-Biennale Berlin, Rheingau Music Festivaland Ruhr Pia- no Festival. Maki Namekawa records and performs frequently for major radio networks in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France. Orchestra engagements include Royal Concertgebouw Orkest Amsterdam, Münchner Philharmoniker, Bamberger Symphoniker, Dresdner Philharmonie, Bruckner Orchester Linz, American Composers Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony. In 2013, she performed the world premiere of the entire cycle of Philip Glass’ 20 etudes for piano solo at Perth International Arts Festival under the par- ticipation of Glass himself, followed by concerts around the world in the US, Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Slova- kia, Poland, Germany and Japan.