Piano Music for four hands

The internationally renowned piano duo Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen gave Programme V of the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2017 Songs of Apollo season: a recital of Piano Music for Four Hands joining Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with his little-known son Franz Xaver Mozart, and Robert Schumann with Franz Schubert. It took place on Sunday 23 July 2017 at 7.30 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform.

The Patron, Dame Judi Dench, welcomed “one of the finest [duos] in the profession today” with “a glorious programme of what has been for centuries one of the most popular forms of ensemble music on the most intimate scale”.

Performers

Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen – piano duet. Based in Munich, the two became alumni of the Society, as the programme book put it, after taking part in a master class it organised with the great pianist Bruno Leonardo Gelber at Bavarian Radio in 1983. Two years later they formed a duo, at first for a single concert; early success brought a long relationship with Sony Classical and engagements across the international concert scene, and they became one of the most celebrated piano duos in the world, known for imaginative programming and the beauty of their sound. Having begun with music for one piano, four hands, they later concentrated on the less familiar repertoire for two pianos – but for the intimate setting of The Muses they returned to four hands at one keyboard.

• Yaara Tal – piano (also solo in the Franz Xaver Mozart polonaises)
• Andreas Groethuysen – piano

Programme

Part I

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Sonata in D major for piano four hands, K. 381 (1772)

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Allegro molto

Franz Xaver Mozart – from the Polonaises mélancoliques for solo piano (1811–1818), played by Yaara Tal

• Op. 17 No. 1 – Tempo giusto
• Op. 17 No. 3 – Tempo di ballo
• Op. 22 No. 2 – Andantino con moto
• Op. 17 No. 5 – Espressivo
• Op. 22 No. 4 – Andante espressivo
• Op. 17 No. 6

Interval

Part II

Robert Schumann – Bilder aus dem Osten (Pictures from the East), six impromptus, Op. 66 (1848)

1. Lebhaft (lively)
2. Nicht schnell und sehr gesangvoll zu spielen (not fast, and in a singing tone)
3. Im Volkston (in folk style)
4. Nicht schnell (not fast)
5. Lebhaft (lively)
6. Reuig, andächtig (remorseful, devout)

Franz Schubert – Fantasie in F minor, D. 940 (1828): Allegro molto moderato – Largo – Allegro vivace – Tempo I

About the programme

Cordula Kempe’s programme notes told the story behind each work. Mozart wrote the Sonata K. 381 as a teenager to play with his sister Nannerl; the music historian Charles Burney reported hearing the two perform it, and the manuscript stayed in Nannerl’s possession.

Franz Xaver Mozart (1791–1844), the youngest of Wolfgang and Konstanze’s children, was born four months before his father’s death and spent his life in his shadow. Taught by Salieri, Hummel and Albrechtsberger, he worked for years in Lemberg (Lviv), toured to Warsaw and Danzig, and became Kapellmeister in Vienna and at the Salzburg Mozarteum; his gravestone reads that his father’s name should be his epitaph. Yaara Tal, who had just recorded his polonaises, said: “When I discovered these Polonaises, there was no escape.”

Schumann, whose career as a pianist ended with a hand injury, loved playing duets but wrote few; his Bilder aus dem Osten, inspired by Friedrich Rückert’s versions of the Arabic tales of Abu Said, were among the best-loved duet works until the 20th century, then all but vanished. Schubert wrote the F minor Fantasie in 1828, his last year; the notes recalled his hopeless love for Countess Caroline Esterházy, his pupil at Zseliz, with whom he played duets – and his reply when she complained he had never dedicated anything to her: “What’s the point? It’s all dedicated to you anyway.”

The duo returned to the Kempe Studio in January 2019 for But there is Mozart.

Credits

• Programme booklet written and designed by Cordula Kempe
• Patron: Dame Judi Dench
• Publicity, printing and archive recording: Max Ross