Four Hands Piano

The outstanding conductor, teacher, pianist and wonderful storyteller Gennady Rozhdestvensky's another unique talent is to discover unknown and forgotten pages of music of different periods. Many of his concerts turn into a fascinating journey of unexplored monuments of Russian and European music. This double album features unfamiliar compositions played four hands by Rozhdestvensky and the remarkable pianist Viktoria Postnikova with Rozhdestvensky playing three (!) instruments – harpsichord, organ and piano. Apart from better known sonatas by Mozart and a fantasia by Schubert, the listeners will discover organ fugues composed by Schubert and a friend of his, a famous composer and conductor of his time Franz Lachner, a harpsichord sonata by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (Johann Sebastian's ninth son), eight-hand compositions by the Czech classic Bedřich Smetana, and unfairly forgotten arrangements of Russian folk songs by the founder of The Five Mily Balakirev.

Robert Schumann knew his way around the piano like hardly any other composer. During his constant quest for new sound, it must have been a real experience for him and his wife Clara when a pedal – as on an organ – was added to their grand piano. The Amsterdam Piano Duo has set out to relive this revelation on this recording of the Studien für den Pedalflügel on an Erard grand piano from 1837 in a version for piano four hands by Georges Bizet.

Louis Lortie is well-known for his Ravel. His recording of the two piano concertos is one of my favorites. This set pairs him with a childhood friend, a fellow pianist from Montréal, Hélène Mercier now long resident in Paris. They play a couple of Ravel's own one-piano, four-hands arrangements (Mother Goose & Rapsodie Espagnole) and three two-piano, four-hands arrangements (Introduction and Allegro, La Valse, Boléro). Actually, Mother Goose was originally written for four-hands at one piano, for a couple of talented children of friends of Ravel's; he later orchestrated it and that is now probably the more familiar version.

Of the great composers it was Schubert who devoted himself most seriously to the piano duet as an independent genre. He wrote more than 30 works for the medium, amongst which is some truly great music which is sadly under-represented in the catalogue.