KVT – Four Hand Playing, Full House Clapping

FOUR HAND PLAYING, FULL HOUSE CLAPPING

I can imagine being a concert pianist and giving recitals on gleaming grands, but I just couldn’t play duets or duos! There’s no way that my personality would be able to cope with such concentrated playing….such cooperation. Just imagine if you’d had a minor tiff with your piano partner before going on stage!

Early this year we had the French Lafitte twin sisters duo-ing and dueting scintillatingly and this week the European Union and Goethe gave us a husband and wife couple who gave their capacity audiences a hugely appreciated recital on the paired grands that grandly dominated the Opera House stage.

German musician Sebastian Euler and his Taiwanese-born wife, Lucia Huang, played one duet and several duos. They are renowned for their interpretations of works by Max Reger, Schumann, Beethoven and Messiaen and I’d love to get a copy of their Schubert album which was due for release last year.

They gave us a mainly easy listening program featuring well known works by Bach, Brahms and six dances transcribed from Tchaikovsky’s romantic and often too-oft heard ballet, The Nutcracker.

When I say easy listening I certainly don’t mean easy playing. It takes a lot of expertise. and often courage, to make the well known appealing and fresh. And the pair brought such a breath of fresh and cleansing air to the Nutcracker that the Sugar Plum Fairy would have been clapping her hands furiously had she been in the audience. The Concerto for Two pianos transcribed by Reger from a composition by J S Bach was a really great way to begin the night and to pull a mainly Vietnamese audience into the palms of their versatile hands.

This year has been something of an Astor Piazzolla  parade in Hanoi and I can’t get enough of his stuff and so I was all ears for the seductive and gorgeous “Tangata” and wasn’t disappointed.

The bravura piece for me was the transcription of Ravel’s intense and almost foreboding “la Valse” composed as an orchestral piece in 1919, just after World War One had played ghoulish havoc over the countryside of France and Belgium. It was deserving of the rapturous applause it received and interval was a welcome relief from its sweeping concentration.

The pair saved up the most challenging for last with Liszt’s ‘Reminiscences de Don Juan’. Liszt took some themes from Mozart’s opera about that famous roué and debauchee, Don Giovanni – a young, arrogant, sexually prolific nobleman who abuses and outrages almost everyone in the opera until he finally encounters something he cannot kill, beat up, dodge, or outwit – and made a great solo piano piece of it in the 1840’s. Late in his life he released  a two-piano version.

Liszt was regarded as the world’s greatest-ever pianist and it is no wonder that he made his compositions so technically demanding that only the brave and talented dare take to the concert stage with pieces that are often considered pinnacles of piano playing skill. (Mind you, some as brave but less talented than Huang and Euler have graced the local stages with results ranging from pretty nice to excruciating.)

Duo D’Accord made Liszt sound superb…and easy.

Great night, great duo! I read somewhere that the Duo’s playing goes beyond normality. And I wholeheartedly agree.

Thanks again Goethe Institute and congrats to The European Union on your anniversary.

PS: when those annoying cameramen poke their cameras in your direction at concerts don’t you just want to poke your tongue out….or give a few juvenile finger signs!!?