(Wergo)

A couple of years back, the formerly Buffalo-based Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo dazzled the world of two piano playing with the release on the Wergo label of their CD Conlon Nancarrow: Studies and Solos for Piano. The disc featured pieces that Nancarrow had composed for mechanical, or player piano, back in the 1940s and 1950s. These pieces were never meant to be played by human hands and are, according to Amy Williams, “both virtuosic in a psychological sense and in a physical sense.” The pieces ask the brain to process rhythms that are definitely not in the normal range of experience, and then to somehow make them come to life at the keyboard.

Williams and her keyboard partner Helena Bugallo transcribed and recorded a baker’s dozen of these works previously thought unplayable. The resulting CD was widely reviewed garnering universal acclaim. Reviewers praised their “super human control” of the complex rhythms, and the “uniquely exhilarating experience” of listening to their performance.

Definitely a tough act to follow—but don’t worry, the duo’s newest release, Stravinsky in Black and White is every bit as exciting as the Nancarrow disc.

All the pieces on the disc use Stravinsky’s own arrangements, either for one piano, four hands (piano duo), or for piano duet (two pianos). The big work on the CD is The Rite of Spring for piano duo, made for the use of the maitre de ballet in planning the choreography and subsequently rehearsing the dancers. Most listeners coming to this recording will already be familiar with the famous orchestral version that helped cause a riot at its 1913 Paris premiere. Minus the orchestral coloring, the primitive rhythmic qualities of the work are even more starkly emphasized. Claude Debussy played the four-hand arrangement with the composer before the Paris premiere, and he noted that “It haunts me like a beautiful nightmare.” Though nowadays the work is more commonly played and recorded on two pianos, Buagallo and Williams play this arrangement with strikingly effective results at one keyboard. The harmonic resonances produced by using four hands on one piano add a richness of sound above and beyond that of the piano duet version.

Another Buffalo connection: A few short years before he became BPO Music Director, a very young Michael Tilson Thomas took part in what was probably the first ever public performance of this work, according to Stravinsky himself, who was still alive at the time. Tilson Thomas subsequently made what was definitely the first ever recording of the piano duet version.

Short and attractively disjointed, Three Pieces for String Quartet is a lot of fun in its piano duet form. The driving chords of the quirky first piece are reminiscent of the “Augurs” movement from The Rite of Spring, while the second, inspired by a clown, has a Petrushka-like quality. The last piece is almost a prefigurement of the static, austere religious style that Stravinsky developed decades later.

The two piano version of the Dumbarton Oaks concerto suits the music ideally. Stravinsky played a lot of Bach at the keyboard during the composition of this piece, one of the highlights of his neoclassical period and the effect of Bach on the work is clearly manifest in this rarely heard piano version, crisply articulated by Bugallo and Williams.

The piano arrangements of Septet and of Movements are both world premiere recordings, the former beginning Stravinsky’s exploration of serial compositional principles, with the latter and later work described by the composer as “the most ‘advanced’ music from the point of construction of anything I have composed.” The duo makes these potentially dry works into an interesting listening experience. The very short Dance, the more rustic sounding original sketch for the first of the Three Pieces, also a world premiere recording, brings this beautifully played, originally conceived and superbly recorded disc to its conclusion. Highly recommended.

The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo will be playing selections from both their CDs at 8pm on Saturday, March 31, at the Church on Delaware Avenue. (For information, call 854-1694 or visit hallwalls.org.)