Maki Namekawa Performance Program

Ritual (1977) – Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett’s place in the piano pantheon is assured through his voluminous and consistently brilliant live performances and recordings, as a soloist and group leader. He is also a prolific composer, though most of his works are springboards for solo and group improvisations. Ritual, however, is a fully-notated work, which Jarrett gave to Maki Namekawa’s husband, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who recorded the work for ECM in the late 1970s. As Davies put it in the original liner notes, “As I worked with the piece, I received enormous satisfaction from the opportunity to express, through Keith’s music, my admiration for his artistry. And although I could never, in improvisation, begin to assume his qualities as a creative force, Ritual is a vehicle through which I can bring his spirit to the listener. Those who know Keith will hear him in this music. It couldn’t have been written by anyone else.” Tonight’s performance represents the New England premiere of the work.

Toccata (2022) – Joe Hisaishi

Namekawa has had a fruitful collaboration with Joe Hisaishi in recent years, though this is the first work written especially for her by Hisaishi. The composer states: “My Toccata was composed at the request of Maki Namekawa has had a fruitful collaboration with Joe Hisaishi in recent years, though this is the first work written especially for her by Hisaishi. The composer states: “My Toccata was composed at the request of Maki Namekawa for a performance at the Philharmonie de Paris, originally scheduled for Autumn 2020. In it I am searching for a fluidity in the sound, coupled with the rhythmic diversity I so admire in Baroque music. By focusing on horizontal, linear movements, and avoiding overt chordal dissonances, I hope to awaken an emotional response from the listener rather than to impose one.” Toccata had its world premiere on May 7, 2022 at the Philharmonie de Paris. Tonight’s performance represents the second performance ever, and the US premiere of the piece.

Music for “365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die” (2021) – Evan Ziporyn

MF365 is a series of 365 miniatures, written to introduce daily episodes of Caveh Zahedi’s podcast. Each one introduces a single story, but each is also a building block in a stand-alone, through-composed work: 365 phrases, in order, separated by silence, each responding to the memory of what came before. Ziporyn joined the podcast project mid-stream, so Part One begins on day 126, i.e., May 6, 2021. 

Piano Sonata (2019) – Philip Glass

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

Philip Glass composed the Piano Sonata—his first, at age 82—for Maki Namekawa. She recounts, ‘I got the music the third week of April 2019. I was about to go to the dress rehearsal for a big orchestral concert in Vienna in which I was the soloist. I opened my email to see the finished score for the Glass Piano Sonata. I had an inner battle about whether I should open it or not because I had other music to work on. In the end, I didn’t have a choice, I had to open it! When I started to play it, I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock. This was a new style of music. I thought immediately of when I play Stravinsky. There are “wrong” notes but they are strange and beautiful.’

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, Namekawa 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 seems like a bunch of funny things at first become parts that pull the piece together. Familiarity breeds understanding. We ourselves are only beginning to understand.  It’s great that it’s someone like Maki. We can discover and say “This is how it’s supposed to go.”’

– Richard Guérin