At 4 o’clock on a scorching Sunday
afternoon, a central London concert hall is one of the last places you’d
want to be – indeed, I had turned down a chance of a boat trip down
the Thames in favour of John Humphrey’s and Allan Schiller’s piano-duet
and piano-duo recital in the Wigmore Hall. Though the Hall – hardly
surprisingly – wasn’t packed, the nonetheless sizable numbers who turned
up were met with a rewardingly unusual programme.
It thus began with the busy textures
of Reger’s transcription for piano duet of the Sixth ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto,
where the different colours of Bach’s instrumental lines rather get
lost in the monotonal sonorities of the piano; it thus becomes more
an exercise in polyphonic enthusiasm. Busoni’s imaginative two-piano
transcription of Mozart’s Fantasie in F minor, K.608, allowed Humphreys
and Schiller to make sense of the texture in a way the Reger had not,
and they pushed it to an exciting conclusion. The first half was rounded
off with Debussy’s rarely heard En blanc et noir, the sound of
two pianos coaxing the composer into unusually rumbustious mood.
The second half was dedicated
to Busoni, and especially one of the polyphonic masterpieces of piano-writing,
his Fantasia contrappuntistica, in its fourth incarnation, the
1922 recasting of the work for two pianos. It was prefaced with his
Improvisation on the Bach Chorale ‘Wie wohl ist mir’,
from 1916. It’s not often one gets to watch this work being performed
in concert, so it’s fascinating to see how Busoni orchestrates for the
sonorities of the piano, how he develops contrasting colours in the
two instruments, reserving his strength for the gloriously resonant
first full statement of the chorale in both pianos.Humphreys and Schiller
judged the pace perfectly.
The Fantasia
contrappuntistica is Busoni’s astonishingly inventive creative solution
to the unfinished fugue in Bach’s Art of Fugue. There’s little
in music as physically exciting as the sound of two pianos on the hunt,
but Humphreys and Schiller didn’t give in to the temptation of sheer
volume. Instead, they concentrated on the dramaturgy of the piece. It
opens (and closes), for example, with the pianos exchanging imperious
phrases antiphonally, which Humphreys and Schiller treated as if they
were lines from two characters on stage – the Fantasia contrappuntistica
requires some attention of its listeners, but this essentially dramatic
approach made it both texturally vivid and architecturally clear.
That was good news; better yet
is that Humphreys and Schiller are taking both Busoni works, and others,
into the studio in September, to record them for Naxos. It will be worth
waiting for.
Martin Anderson
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