Something for Thursday

Many years ago, when I was but a “yoot” and I was taking piano lessons, my teacher–a lovely old lady named Margaret Hooker–invited me, along with several other students, to go see a piano duet that was making the rounds. I don’t remember their names, sadly; I’d like to look them up, but I have no idea where I’d ever start to try to look. They played on two gigantic Boesendorfer pianos that weren’t content to stand with 88 keys; no, these monsters had 92 keys. The new ones were way down at the left end, at the very bottom of the register, and they were all four colored black so as to help the pianists maintain their place. That was a fascinating concert: two pianists sitting across from each other and maintaining the ensemble nature of their music.

Not all piano music for four hands requires two pianos, though! Oftentimes the work puts both pianists behind the same keyboard, so the entire work is executed from a single instrument. This always looks like a fraught process to me: how do the two manage to never cross their hands or stray? Or, what if some composer perversely writes the work so they have to?

I suppose ultimately it’s just one of those things that the good ones just know how to do. Four-hand piano music always sounds…well, four-handed, I guess. What I mean is that it’s clearly only a piano, or maybe two pianos, that you’re hearing…but the work is still somehow larger, more sonorous, with that extra playing going on.

I heard this work yesterday while I was driving around on the last day of my autumn vacation. It’s a suite of six short piano duet pieces by Gabriel Faure, called the Dolly Suite. “Dolly” was the nickname Faure used for the daughter of one of his mistresses. The work is pleasantly urbane and even a bit innocent, with an exuberant dance in the finale.

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