BBC Prom No. 32

The Daily TelegraphThe Guardian
The Times
The Financial Times 
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View the programme details of the concert here

The Daily Telegraph
BBC Proms 2009: Multiple Pianos Day, review
Labèque piano duo upstaged by new sister act. Rating: * * * 
By Damian Thompson
10 August 2009
The link

The Labèque sisters, the irritatingly kittenish Katya and Marielle, have finally lost their crown. It happened during Sunday afternoon’s BBC Prom, one of two devoted to the concept of multiple pianos.

In the first half, they performed Mozart’s double piano concerto with the Britten Sinfonia. “Phoned in” might be a better description. Mozart’s ravishing melodies failed to come to life, partly thanks to the underpowered first violins, which launched into the first and third movements sotto voce. But worse than this was the blurred passagework of both sisters, coupled with strangely affected ornaments which seem to be part of the Labèque house style.

During the interval I listened to a few bars of Alfred Brendel and Walter Klein in the same concerto on my iPod. There was no comparison.

In the second half, the Labèques were punished for their artistic laziness by a performance of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, in which the soloists were Lidija and Sanja Bizjak, two young sisters from Belgrade. The arpeggios in Aquarium were appropriately transparent; the trills breathtakingly fine and delicate. Also, they decided not to milk the comic scales-practising number for laughs, which made it all the funnier (though outside I heard one audience member talking about the “unfortunate finger-slips”).

The overall effect was to persuade us that there is more inspiration in Carnival than in all the composer’s piano concertos combined. Not a hint of circus act. And if concert promoters want to book a pair of piano-playing sisters, now they know where to go.

In the evening Prom, Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Philips took the piano parts in Bartók’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Alas, their contribution was swallowed by the hall’s acoustic. The highlight was John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music. This is a massively difficult piece to pull off in live performance, so it made sense to give it to the London Sinfonietta, in which every musician is a virtuoso. The conductor, Edward Gardner, brought out the surprising influences in the score: big-country American bombast à la Copland, and a cool stream of piano accompaniment (from John Constable and Rolf Hind) running underneath the orchestra, reminiscent of Saint-Saëns.

A work to win over anti-minimalists. But best not to read the droolingly sycophantic programme note, praising its “Lisztian panache” and countless other felicities. The author? One John Adams.

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The Guardian
Proms 32 & 33 – Multiple Pianos DayRoyal Albert Hall, London
By Tim Ashley 
Monday 10 August 2009
guardian.co.uk/music/2009/aug/10/proms-multiple-pianos-day-review

The sound of several pianos playing together is associated, almost invariably, with either the clattering mechanics of modernism or the whirling figurations of the minimalists. The Proms’ Multiple Pianos Day aimed at placing our preconceptions in some sort of context. The modernists and John Adams were bundled together in the evening concert, with Edward Gardner conducting the London Sinfonietta. In the afternoon, meanwhile, Ludovic Morlot and the Britten Sinfonia gave us a broader if rather bitty spectrum of multiple piano potential.

Morlot got off to a perverse start with Fauré‘s Dolly Suite, written for piano duet, but given here in a saccharine orchestration by Henri Rabaud, which, paradoxically, contains not a single piano. Thereafter, Morlot fielded an impressive array of well-known two-piano teams. Katia and Marielle Labèque were heavyweight in Mozart’s E flat Concerto, but mightily exciting in Lutosławski’s Variations On a Theme of Paganini. The world premiere of Left Light by the fashionable Anna Meredith turned Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips into competitive duellists. Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals was done with bags of charm, meanwhile, by Lidija and Sanja Bizjak.

Gardner’s concert was hit and miss, however. A roster of pianists including Ashley Wass and John Constable waged war with the Albert Hall’s cavernous acoustic in George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. Stravinsky’s Les Noces was let down by unaccountably tentative choral work from the BBC Singers and a variable lineup of vocal soloists.

The high point was Adams’s Grand Pianola Music, ravishingly played by Constable and Rolf Hind, and with Gardner finely attuned to its ambivalent amalgam of transcendentalist rapture and banality.

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The Times
Proms 32, 33: Pianos Day at the Royal Albert Hall
By Geoff Brown 
11 August 2009
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/proms/article6790341.ece

Multiple pianos? Sunday’s two Proms couldn’t hold a candle to the concerts of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the 19th-century American who thought nothing of staging events for ten or 20 pianos. The most the Albert Hall housed was four, clustered in a group like hippopotamuses snoozing in a pool.

Fingers pounded in the evening, though not always to great effect. The acoustic chipped in, swallowing up decibels. And the repertory was patchy. George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique may be the composer’s most famous piece, but it’s also his most threadbare. I pitied the piano phalanx bashing it out with the London Sinfonietta, but envied the different foursome slicing through the chattering rhythms of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the towering “sung ballet” that Antheil partly mimicked. Tatiana Monogarova (vibrant as the Bride), the unbuttoned BBC Singers, the vigorous Sinfonietta percussion and the conductor Edward Gardner all helped to raise the excitement. Quality soared too with Bartók’s two-piano and percussion sonata, sharply dispatched by Philip Moore, Simon Crawford-Phillips, Colin Currie and Sam Walton.

Enough of piano pounding. What of rippling arpeggios? Plenty of those, ironic and graceful in the performance of John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music. Porcelain charm? That came in the afternoon, when Katia and Marielle Labèque trickled a mite tediously through Mozart’s two-piano concerto, K365, with Britten Sinfonia and the conductor Ludovic Morlot. The girls’ sparkle arrived with Lutoslawski’s Paganini Variations: witty, mischievous, just what we needed after the opaque pleasures of Anna Meredith’s BBC commission Left Light (featuring Moore and Crawford-Phillips).Meredith brings fresh air to Britain’s new-music scene, though I wouldn’t pick this ten-minute ride through quiet plonks and juddering thirds as her best advertisement.

All this and The Carnival of the Animals. Not every creature shone in Saint-Saëns’ famous menagerie, but the soloists Lidija and Sanja Bizjak had lots of fun in the “Pianists” movement practising their scales out of sync. We needed light relief, considering the battering to come.

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The Financial Times
Multiple pianos day, BBC Proms, Albert Hall, London
By Richard Fairman
11 August 2009 3 stars/4stars
ft.com/cms/s/2/43cc2922-868e-11de-9e8e-00144feabdc0.html

One of my earliest memories of the Proms is a television broadcast of Liszt’s Hexameron in a version for six pianos and orchestra. Even if the music was forgettable, the sheer lunacy of having six pianists in one piece fixed the Proms in my mind as a place where music could be fun.

That is probably the main message to have come out of Sunday’s double- Prom, billed as “multiple pianos day”. The recent tradition of focusing on a single instrument for a day has already given us Proms devoted to massed voices, violins and, last year, “Folk Day”, so the piano deserved its turn. The question was what to make of it.

In the afternoon the aim was simply enjoyment. A lot of families in the audience had been drawn by Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and it was probably sensible to keep the programme’s more challenging items short. The premiere of Anna Meredith’s Left Light envisioned a single arc of sound that emerged from silence and rose to a full-orchestra uproar in 10 minutes, though it rather relegated its two pianists to secondary status. Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini for piano duo were over in a flash as the virtuoso Labèque sisters hammered through them, and they did something similar, to less agreeable effect, in Mozart’s Concerto for two pianos, K 365. The Britten Sinfonia under conductor Ludovic Morlot provided spruce playing throughout.

The evening concert, however, had greater purpose. In the 20th century, composers were attracted to the percussive possibilities of multiple pianos and some of the best-known examples were here. Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, playfully delivered by Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips, and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, cleanly sung by a Russian vocal quartet and the BBC Singers, both have their roots in folk music and could have done with more earthiness. But Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, which comes white-hot from the factory for modern sounds, and John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music set scintillating rhythms spinning across the hall thanks to Edward Gardner’s crystal-clear direction of the London Sinfonietta. Four pianos may have been Sunday’s maximum, but there was far more music than Hexameron ever had to offer.

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The Evening Standard
Multiple Pianos Day comes to the Proms
By Barry Millington  
10 August 2009  
Stunning: The Labèque sisters
thisislondon.co.uk/music/review-23730242-details/Multiple+Pianos+Day+comes+to+the+Proms/review.do?reviewId=23730242

Multiple Pianos was the theme of yesterday’s pair of Proms, beginning with a family-style afternoon concert. Ludovic Morlot conducted the Britten Sinfonia in charming performances of Fauré’s Dolly Suite and Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals (Lidija and Sanja Bizjak the soloists).

The Labèque Sisters stunned with their sparkling synchrony in Lutoslawski’s Paganini Variations, a work they introduced to the Proms nearly three decades ago, and offered both subtlety and style in Mozart’s E flat Concerto, K365.

Anna Meredith’s new work, Left Light, with Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips the soloists, expands from “narrow and compressed material” to “something wider and wilder” at its climax. If intended as no more than easy Sunday afternoon listening, it perhaps justifies the award of a BBC commission.

John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music, played in the London Sinfonietta’s evening concert under Edward Gardner, was the piece that controversially opened the door in 1982 to such postmodernist artlessness. Arguably a landmark in the early Eighties for those weary of modernism, Grand Pianola Music now sounds more than ever like the apotheosis of banality.

When new in 1926, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, with its electric bells and aeroplane propellers, sounded a genuinely futuristic note, though without the intended accompanying film it quickly outstays its welcome.

Moore and Crawford-Phillips, with percussionists Colin Currie and Sam Walton, brought a suitably metallic edge to Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, but the BBC Singers needed to tap a more primitivist vein in Stravinsky’s Les Noces.

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