On the 18th and 19th of August Dave Smith’s 75th birthday was celebrated at Café Oto with two concerts of his music, performed by Jan Steele, Janet Sherbourne, and himself. Each concert began with Smith, who is an extremely masterly pianist performing works of his, and concluded with Steele and Sherbourne performing his major work, Albanian Summer.

Albanian Summer was written in 1980 for Steele and Sherbourne, and performed widely by them for a while. These performances were the first in about 30 years. The work is a sort of travelog of a number of summers that Smith spent in Albania in the 1970s, and includes over its approximately 45 minute duration evocations of Albanian bagpipes (which is how the piece starts), Albanian Communist “anthems,” folksongs, and dances. On both evenings it was engaging and enjoyable and rousing. The performances were completely compelling.

The first concert began with Smith performing three substantial works. On the Virtues of Flowers, a half-hour piece written for a hospital’s 30th-anniversary concert, celebrates the restorative power of flowers in patient recovery. Its meditative, jazz-inflected themes frame a faster, more intricate middle section. The concert, held in partnership with LondonArt, drew a crowd that mixed musicians, painters, and installation artists, reflecting Smith’s belief that contemporary music and visual art share a common rhythm of experimentation. The other two works—Nails and All This and Less—were sharper and more dynamic, originally conceived as part of a larger cycle that, as Smith put it, “never quite materialized.” The latter took shape in response to a 1979 Financial Times review that dismissed his peers with the line: “Satie without the wit; Ravel without the grace; Cage without the silence; Rakhmaninov without the tunes: the recent music of Gavin Bryars and John White is all this, and less.”

The second evening’s concert began with Smith playing fourteen pieces from his First Piano Concert. The Concert was a reaction to the more than one hundred tangos that were written by many composers, including Smith, for the Tango Project of Yvar Mikhashoff. Hearing one of Mikhashoff’s “Tango Marathons” at the Almeida Festival in 1985, Smith thought that “it was apparent that many of the featured composers had not seriously engaged with any form of tango.” In reaction he wrote a set of 24 pieces for piano, each 3 to 4 minutes long, each one “relating to specific musical genres or piano playing styles, western or non-western, well-known or obscure, real or imagined.” The fourteen played on this concert included as well as a tango and a bossa nova, a Charleston, a Calypso, and Hokey Cokey, and some vaguer forms: Afterhours, Nocturne, and Avash Avash (which is an arrangement of a section of Albanian Summer.) Smith’s playing in both evenings was powerful and satisfying.

Both of the concerts were, to put it one way, well attended, or, to put it another way, mobbed; and both were full of the joviality that one would expect from a birthday party. So not only did they offer the opportunity to experience a sizable and satisfying sampling of a serious and impressive composer’s work, they also were a festive celebration of that composer’s accomplishments.