Per Quattro

Description

The piano duet is one of the most popular types of chamber music configurations, with a history dating back almost to the very beginnings of that instrument. Playing four hands was a popular pastime among high-born young ladies and frequently an excellent pretext to strike up a closer acquaintance with potential husbands - naturally, with the family's permission. Apart from this purely social dimension, four-hand pieces played a major role in music dissemination before the emergence of the radio and audio recordings, when music was performed live in domestic contexts. Hence such a great demand for arrangements of operatic or symphonic fragments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Such pieces were primarily meant for amateur performance on the piano, typically by two persons playing together. Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, or in this case - four hands are better than two. As cliche as it may sound, the obvious truth of this statement does not automatically make four-hand music popular in our times. It is commonly though unjustly considered as purely amateur repertoire, and typically discarded once the first stage of musical education is over. Contrary to such judgments, forming a professional piano duet is far from easy. It is essential that the musicians develop a shared concept of interpretation and a similar approach to the music, which, in turn, influences their decisions concerning details of phrasing, tempo, dynamics, articulation, and pedalling. Listening to such a duet can therefore prove rewarding. Though four-hand piano repertoire is much less popular nowadays than solo pieces, it is arguably no less interesting and it covers the full range of musical forms and genres. - Malgorzata Grajter (transl. Tomasz Zymer)