(photo: John Mazlish)

Amy Williams is coming back to Buffalo, and that’s a good thing. No, make that a very good thing. Williams is one half of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, along with her duo partner, Helena Bugallo. The duo hasn’t performed in town since 2000, and their return is long past due.

Their concert is presented by Hallwalls, by special arrangement with the Church and with the generous co-sponsorship of the Yvar Mikashoff Trust for New Music and Righteous Babe Records. It takes place at 8pm on Saturday, March 31. The event will find the duo performing for the first time at Buffalo’s newest concert venue, Asbury Hall at the Church, on Delaware Avenue. (For ticket information, call 854-1694 or visit hallwalls.org.)

The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo is internationally acclaimed for their virtuosic playing of the most technically challenging modern music for both piano duo (two players at the same keyboard), and piano duet (two pianos). The Hallwalls concert program will feature the artists in works for piano duo.

In addition to their extensive concertizing in the standard modern repertoire for piano duo, Bugallo-Williams have also been leaders in the commissioning of new works for the medium.

Williams, a Buffalo native, has deep roots in modern music. Her father Jan, a retired UB faculty member, is both a composer and a multi-talented percussionist, while her mother Diane is a retired BPO violist.

The international profile of the duo jumped dramatically a few years ago with the release of their CD of the music of Conlon Nancarrow, Studies and Solos for Piano, on Wergo, a leading European label for new music.

Nancarrow was an interesting figure in mid-20th-century music. Born in Arkansas in 1912, he fought in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist forces of Franco as a member of the American volunteer Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Running afoul of the authorities on his return to the US, he became a self-exile in Mexico. Short of performance resources, Nancarrow increasingly turned to composing pieces exclusively for the mechanical, or player, piano.

The player piano, especially in its best known version, the pianola, played an important role in musical life in the period 1880-1930. Even George Gershwin had taught himself to play the piano as a small child initially by playing on a pianola. But with the advent of radio in the 1920s, the instrument’s popularity rapidly diminished.

Nancarrow composed about 50 pieces for the player piano, works that have been described as “among the most teasing and delightful creations of mid-century experimentalism.” Bugallo and Williams faced a genuine challenge when they decided to arrange some of these pieces for concert performance. Artvoice recently spoke with Williams, by phone at her home in Pittsburgh, where she is on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh.

“Nancarrow had no intention for this music to be played by humans,” Williams said. “He wrote about 50 pieces for player piano and we play 13 of them—we’ve decided that the others are unplayable. There are only 13 of these pieces that human hands can handle. But they are both virtuosic in a psychological sense and in a physical sense. Because they were written for machines, there is obviously no consideration of what is comfortable for the human hand.

“There is also no consideration of what the human brain can handle in terms of complex rhythms, so the pieces are always challenging. Some of them we’ve played for a number of years, but they’re always difficult.

“But that’s our problem; the audience hopefully will be able to sit back and hear wonderfully jazzy rhythms and exciting textures and very fast speeds, and even some catchy tunes. It is pretty complex, but also in some ways it’s very direct music. It communicates very directly. There’s not a lot of excess. Everything that’s there has to be there, and I think it speaks to audiences in a very direct way. I think that’s why audiences enjoy it.”

Listening to a recording of Nancarrow’s player piano versions recorded on a tinny-sounding upright does have its own kind of charm, but it pales on hearing the duo’s versions on a richly resonant concert grand. And, Williams noted, their transcriptions are as faithful as they could be to the original pieces in terms of actual pitches, rhythms and tempos.

The concert also features a world premiere, David Lang’s gravity / not gravity, commissioned by the duo with the help of a grant from the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. The late Mikashoff, pianist extraordinaire, would have appreciated this commission. “Yvar was a big fan of David,” Williams said, “and Yvar was the one who brought him to the North American New Music Festival” back in the early 1990s. “David has written some piano pieces for Yvar and in memory of Yvar, so it seemed kind of a perfect match.”

Lang is one of the founders of New York City’s long running Bang on a Can new music festival, and a prolific composer of works as diverse as The Anvil Chorus (think staccato dripping water on a tin roof, not Verdi) and Modern Painters, a critically acclaimed opera about the life of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin.

(photo: John Mazlish)

Of hearing Lang’s music for the first time back in 1992 or 1993, Williams said, “I was struck by the music, by the intensity. Though the textures can be simple, the concepts are never simple behind the pieces. There’s always something very fascinating about how he structures each piece. Within a kind of minimalistic—that’s a superficial word—a minimalistic texture they’re really intelligent and well crafted pieces.

“Sometimes the overall texture seems quite simple and straightforward, as if it doesn’t change, or as if it changes very subtly, but the concentration that’s required to change very slowly is hard. It’s almost like doing tai chi: You think, Oh, that looks easy, until you try it. Your legs start throbbing and you realize it’s not as easy as it looks.

“His music is definitely like that. These two pieces are very slow and spacious but actually quite complex rhythmically. I’m not sure it sounds that way, but we’re feeling a very fast pulse under the slow structure.”

How does gravity / not gravity compare to Morton Feldman’s Piano Four Hands, also on the program? “Well, that’s a beautiful piece, quite simple in the sense that we don’t really need four hands, we need four fingers—although they’re spread out all over the piano. It starts with single notes and then a few chords come in. But what’s so beautiful about it is it starts with just the white notes of the piano, so he creates this very tonal effect, almost like a folk song stretched out over the whole piano. And then gradually some of the black notes creep in, and when they do it’s so surprising and wonderful.

“It’s another piece that’s simple but, I think for the listener, you really have to concentrate to listen to all the subtle things that are happening in the piece, and the resonances. It’s a nice contrast to the other, truly virtuosic pieces on the program.”

The program also includes three works by German composer Reinhard Febel (born 1952), Espace Profond, Chant and Spirale. Williams describes the Febel pieces as “hardcore German minimalism. What I mean by that is it has lot of repetitive textures, but the overall sound is this dark, full, big sound.

“He really takes advantage of the whole range of the piano, so it’s quite contrasting to David Lang’s approach to the piano, which is a much more high-register, lighter, thinner sound, less pedal, and a much more sheer sound. This is big, rich, dark full, huge piano four-hand sound. So they’re really different, but they both use a lot of repetition, but each texture…we’re doing three different pieces by Febel and each has a very different texture.”

The concert features one of Williams’ own compositions, Abstracted Art I and II, inspired by jazz great Art Tatum, who revolutionized jazz piano playing in the 1930s. Fats Waller, a mean jazz pianist himself, was playing in a club one night when he acknowledged Tatum in the audience by saying, “God is in the house tonight.”

“The idea was to remove the influence a little bit, to abstract it, to get away from the influence,” Williams explained. “What I was mostly inspired by was how Art Tatum played the piano. So I was listening to Art Tatum more from a pianist’s point of view than from a composer’s point of view, and trying to capture some of his incredible pianistic technique.

“And I figured it takes at least four hands to do what that man could do with two. It’s a fun piece, and really tries to exploit some of the challenges and choreography of playing four hands at one piano. It swings in moments, and it’s quite visual, as are many of the Nancarrow studies. We have to work out the choreography very carefully.”

And that raises a question: How does the duo learn new pieces, when Williamslives in Pittsburgh and Bugallo lives in Basel, Switzerland, 5,000 miles away?

“We’ll often, when we’re playing a new four-hand piece, get together and read through the piece really slowly before we can even really play the piece, and try to work out the physicality of it,” Williams said. “That’s a tactic we use often…then when you practice you know to sit really far down at the piano and really lower your hand here, and really raise your elbow here. So you’re practicing the physical movements while you’re learning the notes.”

Do you ever have collisions? “Absolutely,” she said, laughing. “We try not to, but that has to be rehearsed as much as the notes—to play this low, under, over, even choreograph the page turns so we don’t run into each other during the page turns. That’s one of the appeals and the challenges of piano four hands, is that there may be another hand where you want to be.”

When asked if the Stravinsky work The Rite of Spring, featured on the duo’s new CD, stravinsky in black and white, was on the program, Williams laughingly answered, “No, it’s half a program and it’s old music. So we thought we could get away with the three pieces for string quartet, which are also early, from 1914, but that’s only six minutes.”

With this concert, the Bugallo-Williams Duo could be instrumental in creating a totally new Buffalo rite of spring. The word is out that the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music may establish an annual event featuring young performers playing new music for piano. If that’s the case, it’s a certainty that Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams will be invited back.