Four hands (Mozartfest 2)

On Sunday night I attended the final concert of the Mozartfest, Peter Donohoe and Martin Roscoe playing piano duets. When I learnt the piano at school I played my way through some of this repertoire with my teacher, including such works as Mozart’s sonata for two pianos (thereby enhancing my mental capacity, it seems) and Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor (a piece which contains one of the least subtle modulations I’ve ever come across). But I don’t think I’ve ever been to a whole concert for these forces before.
Much of the music in this concert was known to me in other arrangements. In the case of Mozart’s Fantasia K608 I found myself missing the variety of tone of the organ (in fact Dame Gillian Weir played it in Bath Abbey earlier in the week). The first half concluded with one of the standards: Brahms’ Variations on the St. Antony Chorale.

The highlight for me came after the interval with the second and third of Debussy’s Nocturnes in a masterly arrangement by Ravel. I didn’t expect to miss the orchestral colour as little as I did. Ravel exploited the distance between the two instruments to suggest a larger group of performers; this sometimes resulted in some cruelly exposed simultaneoous double-octave writing for the two players. I was particularly impressed with their controlled changes of dynamic level. The advertised programme ended with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. I have to admit that apart from the Vespers Rachmaninov’s music doesn’t do very much for me, though I find myself attending performances of it quite often. I didn’t know these pieces (often not very dance-like) at all, so I had no orchestral arrangement intruding this time. For an encore we had two of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances. The concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

A note on the venue: many of the people attending these concerts are old and/or infirm, but the first thing they have to do on arrival is grapple with the heavy swinging doors of the Assembly Rooms. Why, especially in these days of easy access, can’t one door at least be fixed open 20 minutes or so before each concert, as happens at (say) the Wigmore Hall, or almost every other concert venue I’ve ever been to?

Rachmaninov (represented this time by a movement from the Vespers) is a tenuous link to Saturday night when we battled through atrocious weather conditions and (in my case) a cold to sing a concert at Dulverton with the Exultate Singers. All the pieces, except some spirituals and folksong arrangements, were known to me though in some cases I hadn’t done them for some time and of course I hadn’t necessarily done them with this choir before.