Tag: piano duet

Galvanic lunch hour with the Rangapu Duo at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
LIAM & NOELLE
The Rangapu Duo – Liam Wooding and Noelle Dannenbring

LISZT – Funérailles (from Harmonies poétiques et Religieuses)
CHOPIN – Ballade in F Minor Op.52
SCHUBERT – Fantasie in F Minor D.940
DAVID GRIFFITHS – Rumba (from “Three Coquettes”)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday, 26th October, 2016

The names of both performers in this lunchtime concert at St.Andrew’s were new to me, each of them being Hamilton-based musicians, though I ought to have remembered that Liam Wooding was a prizewinner at Christchurch in 2015 at the National Concerto Competition. His duo partner, Noelle Dannenbring, for her part won the University of Waikato Concerto Competition earlier this year. Currently, both are studying at the University under the tutelage of Katherine Austin, Wooding having previously completed a course of study at Auckland with Rae de Lisle.

Knowing/remembering none of this, I was thus unencumbered by any great weight of expectation regarding either repertoire or its performance, when approaching this concert. So, it was, therefore, an exhilarating experience to find myself thrilled and delighted, firstly by the programme, and then by its delivery. Each pianist contributed a solo item to the programme, the pair then combining forces as a duo, where their playing proved just as richly compelling.

First up was Liam Wooding with a work by Franz Liszt, called Funérailles, one of a set of pieces named Harmonies poétiques et Religieuses. Scarcely known as an entirety, only two of the ten pieces, Funérailles, and the grandly-named Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (The Blessing of God in solitude) are regularly played – though they have claims to be the finest of the set of pieces, each of the ten has its own particular kind of gravitas which works best when heard in the context of the whole.

Funérailles, as with the Bénédiction, readily generates its own expressive qualities as a stand-alone piece; and Liam Wooding’s astonishing performance brought out all of the music’s strength, power and poetry. The proximity of Chopin’s death to the time of the piece’s completion (October 1849) has led to an assumption that the music enshrines some kind of tribute by Liszt to his friend and contemporary – but the former’s focus was firmly on his native land, Hungary, and the 1848 patriotic uprising against the occupying Hapsburgs, which was brutally crushed, with the Prime Minister and a number of Hungarian generals executed by the Austrians.

Liam Wooding’s playing most appropriately “took no prisoners”, plunging into the opening bass sonorities with monumental force, bringing out the piece’s “chromatic ghoulishness” by way of characterising a mounting sense of terror, despair and hopelessness, here reaching a point where the senses were almost overwhelmed, before breaking off and invoking a kind of funeral-like processional – Wooding’s visionary interpretation readily traversed those realms between private sorrow and public grief, casting a great feeling of solace over the piece’s soundscape, and varying the emphases as the music modulated from key to key, here grieving, and there paying homage to bravery and steadfastness.

And what a tremendous effect the pianist made with those infamous left-hand octaves! – obviously inspired by Chopin’s renowned “hooves of the Polish Cavalry” sequences in his Op.53 A-flat Polonaise, Liszt extended the idea beneath vain-glorious fanfares in the right hand, creating a kind of “freedom – or death” aura about the sounds, reinforced by the sudden breaking -off of the passage and its descent into a reprise of the funeral march. Wooding most movingly characterised this section as a dissolution into a more private and personal tragedy, one which was then mocked and savagely scattered by the brief return of the “octave passage”, concluding bleakly with a number of hollow, single-note utterances.

After such ravages, Noelle Dannenbring’s beautifully-floated awakening of the opening of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade seemed to gently open the shutters and allow our recently-assailed vistas some sunshine and gentle breezes. Less pictorial, more abstract than Liszt’s music, Chopin’s evocations here pursued a subtler, though no less telling course, mapped out by the pianist with refreshing directness, her playing giving the somewhat obsessive main theme plenty of “through-line”, and melding the subsidiary ideas, such as the contrasting chordal sequences, unselfconsciously into the flow. She made the most of certain moments, such as the return to the opening idea midway, capped off by a gentle, almost Lisztian melismatic flurry, just before the main theme’s “canonic” treatment. Towards the piece’s end Dannenbring’s playing seemed less concerned with “virtuoso roar” than clarity and proportion, proclaiming the composer’s regard for the music of Bach and Mozart.

Having demonstrated their individual skills, the pair returned as their newly-formed musical partnership, the “Rangapu Duo”, ready to present for us one of the undoubted masterpieces of four-handed piano literature, Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor D.940. Earlier this year, Wellington pianists Catherine Norton and Fiona McCabe had, during a St.Andrews concert in July, given us an even later, if less extended Schubert duet, the Grande Rondeau D.951, a work utterly charming and filled with beautiful resignation, as opposed to the forlorn anxieties and desperate energies of the Fantasie.

I loved the Rangapu Duo’s performance of this work, which, it seemed to me, “sang in its chains like the sea”, to paraphrase the words of poet Dylan Thomas. And though the players didn’t hold back from vehement expression at certain points of the discourse, the music never descended into the realms of near-dissolution, as does the slow movement of the composer’s A Major Piano Sonata D.959, which hints at anarchy and madness – Dannenbring and Wooding did the Fantasie no such violence, but made sure the music’s “fate-like feeling of necessity” was conveyed to us with all the expressive force they could muster.

We certainly needed a kind of “pick-me-up” to finish the concert, and the duo obliged in great style with New Zealand composer David Griffiths’ jolly Rumba, a piece from a work called Three Coquettes, written in 2012. Something of a polymath, David Griffiths is a performer and teacher as well as a composer – he’s composed mainly for the voice, though there’s a group of piano compositions which suggest he knows his way around that instrument pretty well – Rumba generates exactly what its title might suggest, driving rhythms, high energies and colourful contrasts. Perhaps we might hear the Rangapu Duo in Wellington again, sometime, playing the whole of David Griffiths’ “Coquettes” suite for our further pleasure!

“Deux du même” give considerable pleasure at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concerts presents
“DEUX DU MÊME”

Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton – piano duet

JOSEPH JONGEN (1873-1953) – 2 Pieces from “Pages Intimes”
Il était une fois (Once upon a time….)
Le Bon Chîval (The Good Horse)

FRANZ SCHUBERT
Rondo D.951 “Grand rondeau”

SERGEI RACHMANINOV  (from “Six morceaux” Op.11)
Barcarolle
Valse
Romance
Slava! (Glory)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 20th July 2016

The concerts I enjoy the most, I think, are those which, in a sense, I don’t really see “coming” – that is to say, those I wouldn’t beforehand expect to enjoy as much as sometimes turns out. So it was such a pleasure to be set upon, taken over, surprised by joy and delight, and thoroughly warmed through-and-through by the duet-playing of Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton in their recent St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace lunchtime recital!

These two musicians (styling their partnership as “Deux du même” – two of the same) conveyed to us such engagement with and enjoyment of both the music and the process of bringing it to life, I for one at the end of it all felt both delighted with what we’d heard and frustrated that this wasn’t a full-length concert!  It was more than any one thing which worked this alchemy of performance pleasure – every ingredient in the mix, repertoire, technique, rapport, commitment, focus, the instrument, the venue, had something to contribute to the exhilaration and satisfaction afforded by the occasion.

Beginning with the repertoire, the choices were fascinating – here was my first experience of the music of Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (even if the name wasn’t entirely unknown to me), and a most stimulating one. From a work, Pages Intimes, originally written for piano duet and later orchestrated, came two absolutely delightful movements, the first appropriately entitled Il etait une fois…. (Once upon a time….). Reminiscent of Ravel, and none the less for that, the piece played with a three-note motif, with the music gradually becoming more filigree in character – a very atmospheric and flowing performance, flecked with currents and flashes of light.

The second movement, Le Bon Chîval (The Good Horse), demonstrated plenty of joie de vivre, as well as a good deal of “personality” in the music’s varied flow – there was nothing remotely mechanical in these trajectories, but exciting and engaging momentums, a journey punctuated by both excitements and reflections, with the music’s ending a kind of reminiscence of the ride.

The players having established their partnership, even to the extent of overcoming the irritation of a squeaky piano seat, Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton proceeded to change places for the next item, Franz Schubert’s Rondo D.951.This was the composer’s final four-hands work, published a month after his death with the title “Grand Rondeau”. McCabe and Norton brought it all to life once again, encouraging the piece’s innate lyricism to blossom while allowing the dovetailed rhythms to chatter and burble in excited conversation.

The duo’s playing also caught the different character of the sequences, such as with a prayer-like passage just before the recapitulation – it had a different dimension of manner to what had gone before, more intimate and direct, voiced as though something other-worldly had appeared and was speaking with the composer’s own tones. Schubert obviously enjoyed surprising his listeners, switching almost without warning occasionally between lyrical outpourings and passages of great declamation, and taking us on harmonic explorations of wondrous spontaneity. The duo relished these flavoursome instances of unfettered creativity, and were ready and waiting at the piece’s rounding-off, with the theme stealing back in the bass and counterpointed in an insouciant, “I know you’re there” way – marvellous playing!

Rachmaninov’s contributions to the four-handed piano literature encompass both works for duet and for two pianos – his Op.11 collection “Six Morceaux” was written in a few short months in 1896, a year before the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony. Of course, nothing of that unforeseen setback clouded the achievement of this work, in both keyboard and compositional terms the most impressive of the young composer’s efforts to date.

While one would have liked to have heard the whole set, which is seldom performed in public, Catherine Norton and Fiona McCabe earned our gratitude in presenting four of the six pieces. They began with the Barcarolle, one whose waters seemed to be the darker, more chilly Slavic kind rather than the usual indolent sun-drenched Mediterranean variety. The pair instantly established the music’s restless, volatile character, then, from out of these yearning, unsettled beginnings and the swirling figurations that followed, brought forth the impressive, cathedral-like theme in its different versions – like looking at the same structure from different viewpoints. An example of this was the way in which the theme returned accompanied by a triplet rhythm, the music wreathed in bleak harmonies before being softened by some warmer right-hand figurations, and a ray of sunshine with the final chord.

Next was the Waltz, angular and laconic, with po-faced humour, expressed by mischievous impulses punctuating the lines – the players even unintentionally went as far as losing a moment or two of synchronisation, but soon caught up with one another – all in the interests of the music’s character, of course! I liked the Satie-like timbres in places, with tintinabulating treble figures set dancing, and a delightfully throw-away ending with which to round off the piece.

With the Romance that followed, the music was all full-throated sonority, anguished declamations subjected to obsessively repeated chromatic figurations – more a “Lament” than a “Romance” I thought, on this, my first hearing. The intensities didn’t let up with the final movement, titled “Slava” (Glory), one which used the well-known Russian folk-tune employed by both Beethoven in his Op.59 No.2 “Rasumovsky Quartet” and Musorgsky in the coronation scene of his opera “Boris Godunov”. The theme emerged canonically at first, the players skilfully controlling its ever-growing amplitude before allowing it to blaze forth over the final pages – in effect it almost out-Musorgskied Musorgsky in his “Pictures at an Exhibition” mode. Sensationalist that I am, I particularly enjoyed the minor-key version of it in the bass, with shrill treble trills ringing out at the other end of the keyboard. Catherine Norton and Fiona McCabe held us in thrall throughout with their playing, building up to and delivering sonorities that threatened most excitingly to burst at the seams, and overwhelm us in great floodings of tone and energy. Exhilarating, and at the end, most satisfying – bravo!

 

 

 

An intriguing anniversary concert from Jonathan Berkahn and Heather Easting at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

1816 on the piano
Jonathan Berkahn and Heather Easting solo and duet piano

Music by Clementi, John Field, Weber, Schubert, Diabelli and Beethoven

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 6 July, 12:15 pm

For me, there is a rather compulsive fascination with musical and other anniversaries, and with the fitting of events, of births and deaths, into a time-frame. Here I’d met a kindred spirit who introduced the programme by referring to some of the major events of around two hundred years ago. They had mainly to do with war – the Napoleonic Wars and most closely, the Battle of Waterloo, which took place six months before the year in question. The Congress of Vienna too, had run from the end of 1814 to the June in which Waterloo had taken place. The Congress was intended to and largely did dismantle everything that Napoleon had achieved, and effectively restored absolute monarchy wherever it had prevailed before. It was in the city where the waltz was becoming a craze and where someone responded to an enquiry how the Congress was faring, saying “il ne marche pas, il danse” (a play upon the dual senses of ‘marcher’, being both, literally, to march and to come along or to progress.

Jonathan Berkahn’s contribution to Congress lore was to remark that it experienced much but learned nothing, a variant on ‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ (how many egregious examples could we find today!).

There were one or two names we’d heard of, like Schubert and Beethoven, and others like Weber (no not Webern) known to the scholars, and others who might have become more famous if their names had started with B or S.

Clementi, for example, opened and closed the show. Those who’d learned the piano for a couple of years knew his name on account of nice if somewhat unmemorable pieces, probably called sonatinas, that were regarded half a century ago as good for children. There were flashy bits that were not very hard but could, in the right hands, sound impressive; but Jonathan played a piece from a huge collection of exercises called Gradus ad Parnassum (Latin: ’steps to the home of the Muses’); No 18, comprising an Introduction and a Fugal allegro, first a series of arresting flourishes and then a not very fugal but confident and courtly number. He captured the spirit, serious and a little tongue-in-cheek.

The final piece, also by Clementi, was a Waltz in C, Op 38 No 9 which Berkahn characterized learnedly as cheeky and cheezy; indeed it gave one renewed respect for the composer as someone who could be flippant and playful, and excellent at writing ideal pieces to end concerts with.

One of Clementi’s students was Irishman John Field, famous for inventing the Nocturne, one of which Berkahn played, the second, in C minor: rolling arpeggios and a melody that might indeed have had a trace of the blarney.

The arrival on stage of Heather Easting to take her cosy place at the bass end of the piano, provided the occasion for some pertinent and amusing musico-political asides. Weber was not one of Clementi’s pupils but was nevertheless a brilliant pianist who wrote a lot of often showy music for his instrument (his most famous piano piece today might well be Invitation to the Dance which we know almost solely through Berlioz’s orchestration). His Rondo from a set of pieces for piano-four-hands, Op 60, was lively and entertaining, for both the players (evidently) and the audience.

Jonathan assumed in his audience a depth of musicological erudition when he said that Diabelli had written more than just the tune that Beethoven set to a massive and famous set of variations in his latter years. He was also a music publisher and a decent pianist who, remarked Jonathan, wrote music for four hands on an industrial scale, and he referred to blood and thunder as elements of his armory which we could discern in the spirited playing by both keyboardists, and which we could agree was all in good fun.

Schubert and Beethoven
Then came the composer who in 1816 was, i) only 19, and ii) probably considered during most of his life, inferior to all those whom we had already heard: Schubert. The piece Berkahn played (by himself now) was an Adagio from what seems to be a musicological conundrum; D 459 was earlier thought to be perhaps a five-movement sonata, but its third movement (this one), together with movements 4 and 5, was later amputated and then called ‘Three Piano Pieces’, D 459A. That left the first two movements as a putative two-movement sonata in E.

It was here that Berkahn engrossed his audience with an autobiographical snippet about a 17-year-old, grade 7 level piano player who discovered volumes of Schubert’s sonatas in the Wellington Public Library (probably still there: have a look), which included this. It was an immediate epiphany, a Road to Damascus, leaving the pianist with a permanent affliction with which to titillate his listeners ever after.

As with most of Schubert, every exposure is a fresh, profoundly musical discovery, and Jonathan’s playing supported his story.

It might be hard to insist that was on a par with the Beethoven sonata that followed and one would not try. This was one of the four that form a sort of inter-regnum between the ‘Middle’ and ‘Late’ periods, between the Appassionata and Op 101. In fact, he could have played the sonata Op 101 here as it was actually written in 1816, but Berkahn clearly wanted to make a case for the three or four somewhat wayward sonatas, Opp 78, 79, 81a and 90; it was the last, Op 90, in E that he played, and in the context of the other more or less contemporary music played, perhaps we listened through altered ears and musical associations. It also allowed Berkahn to quote Beethoven’s perhaps apocryphal remark that its two movements represented first, a battle between head and heart and second, a love-song between the two. It was a delightful image which the music seemed to be in accord with.

The entire programme delivered a liveliness and spirit of delight, perhaps not always note perfect but which had the far greater virtue, on the part of both pianists, of being contagiously persuasive and fun.

If you were to get the impression that I’d rather enjoyed myself, in both the head and the heart, throughout the concert, I would have to plead guilty.

 

 

 

Gala recital to invest the new piano at Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons – pianists, and friends: Robert Orr (oboe), Bridget Douglas (flute), Rachel Vernon ( clarinet), Robert Weeks (bassoon), Ed Allen (horn)

Schubert: Moments musicaux, D 780
Mozart: Quintet for piano and winds in E flat, K 452
Poulenc: Flute Sonata
Bizet: Jeux d’enfants for piano duet (“piano four hands”)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Sunday 25 January, 2:30 pm

Though the new Steinway piano has been played before, this was a special concert hosted by Chamber Music Hutt Valley to welcome it formally and to attempt to pay off the remaining cost. Thus the players all performed without fees and the Hutt City Council did not charge for the theatre, and at the concert’s end it was announced that the Little Theatre Piano Trust had gained some $10,000, which was expected to cover the balance.

Michael Houstoun himself arranged the concert, and it was a delight to hear him as he introduced the music and his colleagues, with friendliness and a relaxed charm. In addition, I understand, Houstoun had contributed the programme notes, models of pertinence and brevity: a model that practitioners of that craft (not to mention reviewers) might well emulate.

Diedre Irons opened the programme with Schubert’s six Moments musicaux, that explore myriad moods and emotions. While some follow a simple pattern, in more or less uniform character though always with lots of diverting modulations, most follow the classical ABA pattern, offering a ‘trio’ section of quite marked contrast. The outer sections of the first one, Moderato, are emphatic and extravert while the middle is more flowing with a meditative sensibility, all of which Irons captured beautifully.

Houstoun’s note quoted the famous remark that Mozart made to his father that this quintet for piano and winds was the best thing he’d written. That statement might arouse a degree of trepidation in players, but there was no call for it here; though this is not a permanent ensemble that has played together for years, the four wind players have the advantage of wide orchestral experience together, so their playing easily met the music’s expectations; Houstoun was the pianist here. It was the second movement, Larghetto, that most touched the emotions, shifting from the contemplative, to melancholy, to contentment.

Poulenc’s Flute Sonata is one of three sonatas written towards the end of his life, for wind instruments – flute, clarinet and oboe. Each has won a place in the regular repertoire of the three instruments. Without in any way denigrating the other pieces in the programme, the brilliance of this performance by Bridget Douglas and Diedre Irons set it somewhat apart from the rest. Douglas’s playing of the very demanding music, embroidered with double tonguing and fiendish fingering marked it as startlingly accomplished, world class.

Finally, the two pianists at the piano played Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants. It took a little time to trace my previous hearing of this delightful little masterpiece. It was at the 2009 Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson and it was played there by these same two pianists. Then I wrote: “This was at the hands of Michael and Diedre at one keyboard and they revealed the uncelebrated genius of Bizet as piano composer. For Bizet’s death at 35 (the same age as Mozart) was a terrible loss not just to opera, but to piano and orchestral music, and probably chamber music too. The music itself is filled with spontaneity and rich invention, but it needs a joyous and boisterous performance such as we heard here to demonstrate just how fecund was Bizet’s melodic imagination and his sense of shape and style.”

Six years later I can’t do better, for their playing here had the same, perhaps if anything more impressive mastery of the idiom, perfect ensemble, endless variety of colour, wit and esprit.

And it might be good to reproduce Houstoun’s note in the programme: “Children’s Games? What is it with French composers, childhood and piano duets? Ravel wrote his Mother Goose Suite, Debussy his Petite Suite, Fauré his Dolly Suite. All of them glorious, but Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants may well be the best of them all – indisputably a masterpiece.” I still think so.

So the splendid new piano was brilliantly invested in the presence of a full house, and the promise of a series of five fine concerts, starting and ending with piano recitals, and in between, a string quartet, Affetto – an early music ensemble, and a piano and winds quartet.

And I should add, as free advertising, that the lobby of the Little Theatre has finally been brought up to scratch with the expected coffee and bar facilities.

 

Talented piano duettists combine wit and virtuosity for St Andrew’s audience

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nicole Chao and Beth Chen (piano duettists)

Souvenirs de Bayreuth (Massenet and Fauré)
Preludes Op 23, Nos 4, 5 and 6 (Rachmaninov) – played by Beth Chen
Mephisto Waltz No 1 (Liszt) – played by Nicole Chao
La belle excentrique (Satie)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 5 December, 12.15pm

These two pianists, born in Taiwan, gained their master’s degrees at Victoria University, and have studied elsewhere. They have returned to Wellington with a host of awards and prizes in their brief-cases.  They have both become highly polished players who have recently joined forces to play piano duets, and duos, no doubt, which they do with a unanimity of feeling and technical mastery that is not usually acquired in so short a time.

Their programme combined a couple of satirical duets with solo pieces from the normal, yet highly demanding, repertoire.

Messager and Fauré put together as set of five pieces drawn from Wagner: ‘Fantasy in the form of a quadrille on themes from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen’. Unlike certain French (and other) composers, the two friends – teacher and pupil – were enraptured by Wagner’s operas and had seen them in Munich, Cologne, Bayreuth and London.

We were offered no hint as to the respective contributions by the two composers (Messager wrote many operas and operettas, the still popular ballet Les deux pigeons, and conducted the first performance of Pelléas et Mélisande).

The first piece opened with loud chords and continued its brief course in dramatic fashion. The character of the quadrille varied from piece to piece, all danceable no doubt, but more likely to raise smiles; but more likely to raise smiles for the intention was to send up a few of the Leitmotive in a genial, light-hearted way.

Beth Chen played three of the preludes from Rachmaninov’s Op 23 set; hints of sentimentality were to be heard in No 4, but what kept the piece alive especially was the way the sounds produced by the two hands were kept so distinct in their colour and mood, yet created such  a perfect vocal blend.

No 5, in G minor, is the second best-known of the preludes; she played its slightly non-bellicose march carefully, which lent a greater force to the climactic phases. No 6 is rhapsodic in character and Chen gave it a relaxed though scrupulous performance, with sensitively placed rubato; again the two hands took up sharply contrasting roles – bright chords in the right hard, the left playing legato arpeggios. These were highly accomplished and authoritative performances.

Then it was Nicole Chao’s turn, with the first Mephisto Waltz, and it was brilliant: the sinister excitement of the first heavy chords, the dangerous, galloping rhythms; the scarlet and black colours of a medieval Satan in the hair-raising rushes of chromatic scales, and then the sudden beguiling calm.  Her playing was a dazzling display of speed, agility and clarity, getting to the heart of Liszt.

The pair returned then to offer another facet of late 19th century French wit, whose musical model was Satie. La belle excentrique [oui, il s’écrite comme ça] describes four characteristics or behaviours of a type of woman only to be found among the French. The Moon March, for example, suggested someone coping with the low gravity that exists on the moon or possibly with three too many drinks. The High Society Cancan with its scraps of tunes that interrupt each other, toy playfully with the spirit of Offenbach. The performances were a splendid substitute for a liquid lunch.

These two pianists await, though I doubt whether they do consciously, an invitation to join Chamber Music New Zealand’s nationwide concert series or even as duet or duo pianists, in the tradition of the Labèque sisters, in Bach, Mozart, Dussek or Poulenc, with the Wellington Orchestra or the NZSO.

 

Sayers and Mapp, varied and delightful piano duets at Waikanae

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Emma Sayers and Richard Mapp (piano duet)

Music by Thomas Tomkins, Mozart, Schubert. Ravel, Kenneth Young, Barber and Poulenc

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 20 May, 2.30pm

A concert of piano duets (four hands on one piano) is likely to raise discussion about the propriety of arrangements and the voicing of opinions about the merits of an orchestral arrangement of a piece for piano four hands (or two hands, for that matter).

As it happens, most of the music at this concert was originally written for four hands though two were later orchestrated for a ballet.

The opening piece was a small surprise from the Stuart period when the keyboard – harpsichord, clavichord, virginals, etc – was being used increasingly as a solo instrument, most notably exemplified in Fitzwilliam’s ‘virginal book’ published in the 19th century.

According to the programme note, Thomas Tomkins’s piece, A Fancy, ‘for two to play’, is probably the first surviving piece for two players at one keyboard. It started quietly giving the impression that the composer was really thinking of only one player, but soon its various layers emerged to justify its treatment by more than one player.

Mozart wrote several sonatas and other pieces for two pianists on either one or two keyboards. This, in F major, K 497, was not one of the best known, and in spite of Emma Sayer’s promoting it as echoing the spirit of the operas that he was writing at the time – The Marriage of Figaro and The Impresario – it isn’t really furnished with the memorable and characterful tunes that made them famous.

They played the opening Adagio cautiously, and there was even a feeling of holding back as the Allegro got under way. The air of hesitancy derived more from the music than the players; in spite of the outwardly lively tunes, and it struck me that Mozart was compensating for a slightly lower level of inspiration by adorning it with decoration and unexpected modulations.

The same feeling lingered in the Andante second movement: interesting rather than beguiling, yet we heard a performance that was well rehearsed, with attractive dynamic and tempo changes. The finale offered more lively music, the two players sporting with each other, exploiting chances to surprise, offering nothing that was routine, and ultimately leaving no room for doubt that the composer was Mozart in his masterly maturity.

Schubert’s Allegro in A minor, thought to be the first movement of a never completed sonata, was entitled by the publisher, Lebensstürme – ‘life’s storms’. It is no 947 in the Deutsch catalogue, which is immediately after the much better known, three Klavierstücke. It deserves to be as well known for it has real strength and dramatic shape as well as having a perfectly enchanting middle section. Stormy is the way it opened but the storm soon passed; it was interesting melodically as well as developing in ways that were typical of Schubert. There’s an underlying swaying rhythm that characterises a beguiling melody before the music returns to the arresting minor key, fanfare-like motif with which it opened.

Though there were charms of rhythm and lyricism that I felt were not totally realised, this performance was persuasive enough to make me pursue the piece further. If you Google ‘Lebensstürme’ and ‘Schubert’ you will find several You-Tube video clips of performances. One which captivated me was by the Georgian twins, Ani and Nia Salkhanishvili at the San Marino Piano Competition.

Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye was written for girls, obviously highly talented, for it’s not particularly easy.  The question whether the original duet version or the orchestral version is to be preferred exercises many people; for my part, I’m seduced by both as soon one or the other starts. This duo approached it fastidiously, the wit and charm discreetly obscured, to be smiled at by others than those who respond only to the gross and obvious in humour. They played it as one, approaching the rise and fall of dynamics exquisitely and making much of the playful turns in treble passages in ‘Hop o’ my thumb’. The suite ended with the droll sleight of hand found in the last phrase of ‘The fairy garden’.

Kenneth Young’s Variations on a Prayer is based on an original chorale-like tune, according to the programme note, which went on to explain that it “explored the nature of prayer, which can take many different forms in pursuit of a universal goal”. It is the sort of comment that seems more likely to come from a composer than a writer of programme notes, but the notes later speak of Young in the third person, linking his musical character with Dutilleux and Takemitsu. In any case, Young’s music finds its way successfully between the rigours of the complex avant-garde and the indulgently melodic and sentimental, and the performance situated it without apology in the company of the early 20th century pieces in the programme.

The recital ended with another two pieces I hadn’t come across before: Samuel Barber’s Souvenirs and Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano Duet (of 1918, and so very early).

The three pieces taken from Souvenirs, a suite of six movements, Op 28 of 1951, were Schottische, Pas de deux and Hesitation-Tango. Though originally written for piano four hands, Barber also arranged it for solo piano, for two pianos and then he orchestrated it for a ballet which was first performed in 1955.  The Schottische has a jazzy quality in quick 3/8 rhythm; then a slow Pas de deux that exemplified the nostalgic aspect of these Souvenirs, and the Hesitation-Tango, (a take, I suppose, on the once-popular Hesitation Waltz that I recall from college dancing classes), slightly reminiscent of Prokofiev with wisps of a big tune that proved evanescent, and leading us into the here and now.

The Poulenc sonata would, one might think, be performed along with the sonatas he wrote for wind instruments near the end of his life, but this one, written at 19, was contemporaneous with the well-known Mouvements perpetuels . well before his ballet, Les Biches, which put him on the map in 1924. One could hear why it’s not so well known, though it’s not inconsequential, and the duo found its varied character, the dense chords in dotted rhythms of the Prélude, the improvisatory interlude called Rustique, and the speedy, staccato Final that was perhaps going nowhere, but gave the impression of generating much energy in doing so.

This enchanting recital made me realise how much pleasure is to be found in the piano duet repertoire. Mapp and Sayers have been playing together for a few years and their performances deserve to be more frequent and widely enjoyed.

 

Impressive recital by piano duettists at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Pangea Piano Project (Ya-Ting Liou and Blas Gonzalez: piano duet)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace Season of Concerts
Dvořák: Slavonic Dance, Op 46 No 1; Tolga Zafer Özdemir: Mesopotamia Suite; Liszt: Après une lecture du Dante; Ligeti: Sonatina; Guastavino: Romance del Plata; Jack Body: Three Rhythmics

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Friday 18 March, 7.30pm

What was revealed in the leaflet advertising this highly enjoyable series at St Andrew’s hardly covered the reality. The names of neither of the two pianists were familiar, nor were two of the composers, though the name Guastavino might have rung bells. The two pianists have played together for several years, and are currently staff pianists at the University of Auckland School of Music.

However, Liszt’s Dante Sonata should have been enough to draw a crowd – Ya-Ting Liou’s performance was highly impressive – and there was the pleasurable certainty of one of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, played in its original form.

But there was also real delight in the four other pieces, all of which demonstrated the pianists’ adventurous taste, but most importantly their ear for contemporary music with a human face.

Tolga Zafer Özdemir is a young Turkish composer who in his Mesopotamia Suite makes a successful and attractive fusion of Middle Eastern and western European musical traditions. In one of his several interesting spoken offerings, Blas Gonzalez suggested Anatolian musical references, though the title would seem at odds with that: I am in no position to compare the musical characteristics of the Turkish heartland (Özdemir was born in Ankara in 1975) with that of the Arabs in what is now Irak. This piece, for one pianist, played by Gonzalez himself, was a splendid demonstration of his musical sensibility, keeping easy control of the fast and irregular rhythms and the quick-silver dynamic changes. It’s a delightful and arresting piece: fast, with strong though irregular rhythms in the first movement; a pensive quality in the second, with sharp dynamic contrasts between calm arpeggios in the left hand and sprays of brilliant notes in the right, hints of Ravel and Bartók; and a strikingly attractive last movement with fast, repeated, staccato motifs.

Ligeti’s Sonatina, for piano duet, was the second piece in the programme involving both pianists (after the Dvořák Slavonic Dance) which confirmed the pair’s singular accomplishment and superb ensemble. It was written in his early years, still in communist Hungary (he escaped to Cologne in 1956) and in a style acceptable to the regime; regardless of the artistic restrictions, Ligeti produced a piece that could hardly be mistaken for music of an earlier era. Yet for today’s ears it comes as a refreshing relief from much of the avant-garde music that Ligeti was eager to immerse himself in. There were tunes; the three movements were quite short, employing a palette recalling the French neo-classicists.

Gonsález remarked that Carlos Guastavino (1912 – 2000) was probably the third best-known Argentinian composer after Ginastera and Piazzola. Though his music is tonal, relatively ‘conservative’, its flavour is nevertheless distinctly mid 20th century. Underneath the charm and ease of Romance del Plata lies an individuality and integrity, the last movement in distinctly Latin American rhythms. In three movements, it proved a highly effective piece for four hands.

Jack Body’s Three Rhythmics has become something of a calling-card for the duo and while they played from the score, it was the product of obvious painstaking and conscientious work, in which I’m sure the composer would have delighted, such was the brilliance and command of their playing.

I first heard this piece – I think it was the premiere – at the October 1987 Sonic Circus, the last of the Jack Body-inspired 12-hour marathons, midday to midnight, of around 60 concerts and recitals of New Zealand music in every corner of the Town Hall and Michael Fowler Centre. At the very start of my reviewing career with The Evening Post, I shared its coverage with my predecessor Owen Jensen; for me it was a fairly overwhelming introduction to much New Zealand music with which I was at that stage unfamiliar.

Three Rhythmics was played by the late Diane Cooper and Dan Poynton. I remembered it with some wonderment because it made such an impact then, and this performance by an Argentinian and a Taiwanese pianist astonished me again. It was a riot of complex rhythms delivered through twenty fingers working at lightning speed; it is an exciting minor masterpiece of which, above all, they made vivid musical sense.

The two main-stream works in the programme were Dvořák’s first Slavonic Dance, which emerged in illuminating and rhythmic clarity, sufficient to encourage one to seek out recordings of all 16 dances in original piano duet format.

And Liszt’s Dante Sonata (Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi una sonata; note the correct translation of lecture: ‘Reading’), as I said at the beginning, was a treat; sadly, not nearly as much played as the B minor sonata. From the very opening, Ya-Ting Liou’s playing was powerful and dramatic yet highly poetic; not too heavily pedaled but with all the density and force called for through the opening phase of this evocation of the Inferno from La commedia divina. Though described as ‘strange, confused and passionate’ (Searle) it can be a spell-binding piece; Liou handled the romantic, Chopinesque middle part with limpid clarity, showing a keen dramatic sense as the excitement grew through astutely handled crescendi and accelerations.

The Liszt was very much of a part with the entire recital, which could be regarded as an adventurous and highly successful exploration of some of the extremes of the Romantic piano world and some aspects of its survival in the present age.