Play it again, boys

David Blake listens to something heraldic from on high
Summer recital, Kiyonori Sokabe (trumpet) and Yutako Oya (piano), Japan Festival 2001, 13 September, Small Hall, Cairo Opera House
The heraldic element was ever present in the music of Kiyonori Sokabe (trumpet) and Yutako Oya (piano), both esteemed artist players on a visit here as part of the now largely cancelled Japanese Festival 2001. They are based in Tokyo, from which city they had their musical education. And some education it must have been. Between them they gave the mostly young audience in the Small Hall of the Opera House a display of brilliant dazzlement of which the only demand could be "play it all again." Such was its variety and colour and waves of strange and beautiful sounds. It was almost cruel to hear it once only. They will go away, these young players, but at least they will have left behind them, for those fortunate enough to get a seat, a high-toned, often witty and elegant display of what really it is like to listen to the music of now -- or now and then.
The two instruments presented did not suggest much togetherness. The piano has friends but the trumpet is not one of them. The trumpet, from the playing of Kiyonori Sokabe, can suggest things even the piano finds difficult -- metaphysical distances, things not there but there, states of being. The tone of the trumpet can be tough, blatant and triumphant, revelling in fortissimos, but Sokabe used its seldom-needed subdued tones. Life or death are much the same to a trumpet but it revels in distance, plenty of which was heard in this performance. This mesmeric performance began with two pieces by Toru Takemitsu. One: Paths; Two: Rain Tree Sketch II. Between things, people and indescribable objects whose substance is light -- far outside day or night or the known areas between which pass most of human life. In the first piece the trumpet sang small detailed songs -- they stopped and then emitted powerful repetitions. Another stop and far, far distant came an answer. It was breathtaking.
Rain Tree Sketch II had the piano stripped. Oya is a unique player. This is the piano peeled of all the fripperies and fancies that history and genius have made of it. It's the piano "pure", still dressed in formal black and white but baring some high fashion of its own.
Where did all the finger action go? Where the fan-like flashing octaves and sudden big dives into the depths, where was the back power and forearm muscle, where was the piano itself? What was this thing whispering, humming, then spitting out basic noises at us as if to show up our hearing inefficiencies? It would be certainly hair-raising to hear Oya in the Bach preludes and fugues because for them you must do away with the clavier first.
In this and the next piece, Quatro Pezzi of Giacinto Sclesi, the piano entered yet another dimension.
Pictorial, carefully polished and honed into dozens of shapes emitted by the piano -- squares, oblongs, tiny lumps of things like seashells and water-worn pebbles honed by the waves over the millennia. The trumpet added distance in the Sclesi which became a conversation by the impossible -- two players and two instruments that had come together from seemingly different constellations.
Halos, the fourth piece by Akira Nishimura, was very formal, like visiting one's relations, at least if they're Japanese, a fully intricate way of covering all the uncertainties of life. Friends and relations! Events full of echoes, memories and reverberations. Nothing is left to chance and like the tea ritual it shows its beauty by its respectful reverence to form. The music was appealing, archaic and entirely ancient sounding. You may get everything wrong except the form. And that was goodbye, Halos.
Next came Takuro Shibayama's arrangement of the Beatles's "With a Little Help from My Friends." Not best Beatles and perhaps not best Shibayama but sad and lengthy. The players were both unborn when the original came out to find its place in the charts. We saw what happens with time's erosion to the spirit. The arrangement struck the little chord. Well-done, but sad.
After the Beatles came John Cage and a piece called Ophelia. It seemed to be a game of questions and answers. Obviously Ophelia was not mad, nor did she seem to drown. She passed over into a no man's land of a little repetition, a little percussion, strung out over time. Cage was good at tunes; Ophelia seemed to dance away on a nicely designed question mark.
The second Cage piece was the famous Suite for Toy Piano. Borne as a jest, it ended as a fashionable Tinkerbell ballet with silver bells and twinkle shells for a baby star lit pianist aged seven.
The Toy Concerto doesn't do badly if you can hear it all. Its composition is not at all bad -- best to get a friend to get you a CD of the music on your hundredth birthday. It did fill the Small Hall with minute silver tones, a pleasure to hear if you're fed up with the Tchaikovsky B- flat minor.
After the Toy Concerto someone played on a pleasant looking cooking casserole with silver gloves or spoons. The tune is good and, strange to say, so was the casserole played by a very young man.
One more Beatles song, "Let it be" by Lennon and McCartney. Like the first Beatles song it was sad. Was the Beatles era as triste as this? After it came the last piece of the evening, Hikari-Light, by the Japanese composer Somei Sato. It was more than worth waiting for.
Light may have been in short supply but it was not murky or black. It was bright, colourful and quite remarkably chic. There was even a rhythm and it was not made of bricks, rocks or pieces of mortar. It was all made of notes, black ones, plain, straightforward ordinary notes of music. No huge Mahler orchestra behind, just plain notes from nowhere. Just trumpet and piano and some silver leaves from the casserole. It sounded clean and open and belonged to this enterprising concert. The notes seemed to be strung together but rushed and rushed down to the bottom of a clatter so macabre, not depressing but funny and amusing. Up the whole thing would slide again to the top of its register and then slump indescribably back once again into the mess. Play it again, right through to the end, so might have been the order for the enjoyment it was giving the public. Sato has a talent to cope with such things, side-stepping all the glue and depression of most contemporary music. The sound of the mess was lovely. But mess it was. Is it hell or damnation. We don't usually laugh at these qualities? What is it, the macabre, stalking the world, more inviting than life or death. High spirits are macabre. The light of the name is there for sure because there is nothing dark about the piece. Dark is dark and light is light. So we must go ask Sato and this wonderful composition for the clue to her enigma.
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