The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo
Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams, pianists

The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo: Hailed as "...one of the world's pre-eminent ensembles devoted to waving the banner for contemporary piano duo literature" (The Buffalo News), the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo has been committed to presenting concerts of contemporary music since 1995. They have been featured performers at the NUMUS Festival (Denmark), Teatro San Martin (Buenos Aires), York Spring Festival of New Music (UK), Cutting Edge (London, UK), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), Hamburg FORUM (Germany), Wittener Tage für neue Musik (Germany), June in Buffalo Festival, North American New Music Festival (Buffalo), Jordan Hall (Boston), Rock Hall (Philadelphia), Stefan Wolpe Festival (Evanston), Society for New Music (Syracuse), 3-2 Festival, Goethe-Institut/German Cultural Center, Americas Society, Merkin Concert Hall (New York City), and OGNAT Festival (Sweden), among others. Their repertoire encompasses substantial late twentieth-century works by major American and European figures, including Cage, Feldman, Reich, Wolpe, Stravinsky, Kurtág, Ligeti, Kagel, and Sciarrino. They have premiered dozens of works by younger composers, many of whom have written especially for the Duo. During the summers of 2000 and 2001, they were artists-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, where they were also featured performers at the Musik aus Solitude Festival. Their upcoming debut CD will be released on the Wergo label in June 2004, produced by the Südwestrundfunk (German Radio); it will feature the complete music for solo piano and piano duet by Conlon Nancarrow, including new transcriptions of eleven of his remarkable Studies for Player Piano. The Duo is based in both Chicago and Basel, Switzerland.

Conlon Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas in 1912 and died in Mexico City in 1997. In his early years, he was a trumpet player mainly devoted to jazz. He attended the Cincinnati College-Conservatory (1930) and later moved to Boston, where he studied composition and counterpoint with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky. In 1937 he enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Nancarrow's socialist beliefs and his involvement in the war caused the US government to deny him a new passport shortly after his return. He decided then to move to Mexico City, where he remained, working in relative musical isolation until the 1980s, when he suddenly gained international recognition. Discouraged by the lack of acceptable performances of his music, Nancarrow turned to the player piano in the late 1940s. His exhaustive exploration of this medium resulted in a series of approximately fifty Studies, which are both unusually idiomatic and utterly original. The present transcriptions are at once removed from the original works and close to them. Absent are the harsh sound of the leather and metal hammers of Nancarrow's pianos (which he carefully modified), the particular acoustics of his cement studio, and the immutable precision of his mechanical instruments. The transcriptions are, however, as faithful as they could be to the original pieces in terms of actual pitches, rhythms, and tempos. The "polyphony of speeds" characteristic of the Studies is solved in the transcriptions in different manners, always taking into account not only the four available hands but also the two independent minds involved. Each player works constantly in reference to and away from the other, allowing the simultaneous realization of complex temporal ratios, such as 12:15:20 (Study #19). Many salient traits of Nancarrow's mechanical music, in particular his rhythmic language, were influenced by an interest in jazz as well as in African and Indian musical traditions.

October 12th, 7:30 PM

Pianists Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams:
music by Conlon Nancarrow for piano 4 hands

Pianist Rei Hotoda:
Music by Japanese Composers:
"Rain Tree Sketch I" (1983) by Toru TAKEMITSU
"Automat at Suginami Ward" (2002) by Yuji TAKAHASHI
"Nacht Klange" (1994) by Toshio HOSOKAWA
"Gensho-shi" (2000) by Noriko HISADA
"Rain Tree Sketch II" (1992) by Toru TAKEMITSU

Pianoforte Chicago
Fine Arts Bldg. 410 South Michigan Ave. #825
Chicago, IL
312-291-0000
www.pianofortechicago.com
Adm. $10.00
(please call for ticket info)