Piano pair more Liberace than Liszt
Anderson & Roe (piano duo) Michael Fowler Centre, March 17
This young pair of extremely talented musicians has set themselves a goal to make classical music more sexy and accessible.
I don’t know about sexy exactly, but the programme in this concert was certainly accessible and audience friendly – and brilliantly played.
A comment overheard during the interval suggested more Liberace than Liszt, but this was misleading and unfair. Having said that, I wondered if the programme might have been ‘‘toughened’’ a little.
The first-half worked brilliantly. They started off with a most convincing arrangement of Leonard Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, originally for small jazz ensemble. Completely in style and wonderfully played, it led into the one piece unarranged by the duo, John Adams’ 1996 work Hallelujah Junction, a terrific piece of minimalism, tempered by shifts in tonality and dynamics that contrasted with the extreme minimalism we heard the night before from Sarah Watkins and Stephen De Pledge in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase.
This led into another Hallelujah, that by Leonard Cohen, in which, with both pianists at one piano, gave us a most affecting set of variations that retained the mood of the Cohen original to uncanny effect.
The half ended with a treatment of the Paul McCartney classic Let it Be, with a style that recalled, but did not imitate, the playing of Keith Jarrett.
The second-half was less convincing. A West Side Story suite led into a small moment from Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice and concluded with their take on Carmen that was well enough done with the brilliance we had come to expect. Maybe a piece from the duo’s piano repertoire might have contrasted in this half – one of Rachmaninov’s superb two-piano works, or something by Schubert, say – just to break up the highly theatrical content and reveal another side of the duo they undoubtedly possess.
Still, after three encores and wild applause, everyone seemed happy.