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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
February 11, 2007
During the nineteenth century, when two pianists sat down to play together, it was generally at a single keyboard; the piano duet was a staple of the amateur musician: Schubert wrote a great deal of music for piano duet (much of it still scarcely known) and even Beethoven's Op.134, his own keyboard version of the Grosse Fuge, is scored for piano duet (thus making it even harder to play).
Although many composers originally wrote out their orchestral music on four staves - Brahms did with his symphonies, for example - it is uncertain as to whether they actually expected this version to be performed by two pianos.
During the last century, though, composers began to see the merits of having two separate keyboards for public performance.
Sunday afternoon's recital by Terence Dawson and Jamie Syer offered a good cross-section of 20th century music for two pianos in fine performances.
Of the three short pieces by Poulenc which opened the programme, the first and last were both energetic and inimitably French - with a distinct hint of Ravel in the slow central section of the first, Capriccio.
The second, Elégie bears an instruction that it should be played as if being improvised "with a cigar and a glass of cognac" at one's side.
Certainly the performance had the gentle, relaxed air one would expect from such instruction, although the music does not, it must be admitted, sound terribly elegiac. Blame Poulenc.
In these pieces Dawson and Syer displayed excellent rapport and ensemble - as, indeed, they did all afternoon.
Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances constitute his last and some would say greatest work.
From the hesitant opening to the thunderous close, Dawson and Syer gave a performance which scarcely put a foot wrong. Tempos may have been on the deliberate side, but there was never any doubt that these were dances we were listening to; moreover the pair displayed a fine line in rubato and the major tempo changes - such as the accelerando from the central slow section of the first movement to the faster music - were meticulously judged.
If there was a downside to the performance, it was the hall itself, which can - and did - seem rather bright. Paradoxically, this also resulted in somewhat muddled and muddied textures in what was probably the most complex music of the afternoon - making the work seem somewhat more discursive than is strictly necessary.
William Bolcom's Recuerdos consists of three Latin-American dances, written so as to be cognisant of the likely environment of a genuine performance - badly-tuned piano and all. Or, as Jamie Syer put it, "some of the wrong notes you'll hear are actually written."
Wrong notes or not, the opening Chôro was charming; Paseo has an almost feline grace and contains hints of Scott Joplin (particularly Solace), while the finale Valse Venezolano featured some very jolly syncopation.
I must regretfully and respectfully take issue with the programme's designation of the final work: to describe Percy Grainger's Fantasy on Themes from Porgy and Bess as being by Gershwin "arr. Percy Grainger" is as inaccurate and dismissive as describing Liszt's great operatic paraphrase on Don Giovanni as "Mozart arr. List".
Grainger's work is firmly in the tradition of Liszt's paraphrases - Gershwin provided the tunes and the harmonic language but Grainger did the rest.
Using nine themes from the opera (and resequencing them) Grainger does indeed provide a brief paraphrase of the work enlivened with sparkling piano figurations and dazzling passagework - Grainger was a virtuoso pianist himself, albeit not one who worried much about accuracy (the "swashbuckling" Eugen d'Albert was his model).
I see signs of a Grainger revival under way and it is to be hoped that Sunday's spirited, nay ebullient performance of this fantasy will help establish in the minds of Victorians the fact that there is far, far more to Percy Grainger than "Country Gardens".
For enthusiasts of the two-piano repertoire, like myself, this was a real treat.
More please.
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