When the piano becomes a pantomime horse: the strange power of duets
One of the keenest pleasures of music is witnessing a great duet partnership in action. The classical music world can boast some fine long-standing partnerships: violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien, baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber, and best-known of all, those glamorous piano-playing Labèque sisters.
In terms of quality, the piano duo of Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne easily belongs in their company. They are both wonderful artists at the top of their game, with starry solo careers. Lewis inclines more to the great central Viennese repertoire of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Osborne prefers the more highly coloured world of Messiaen and Ravel. Like all pianists, their diaries have been almost empty for the past ten months and Lewis adds, “the past three months have been the most threadbare of all.”
They met in 1999, when they were both among the first intake of BBC New Generation artists. The Englishman (Lewis) and Scotsman (Osborne) hit it off immediately, and decided to form a duet. This week they are releasing an album of charming mostly French duets, recorded just before lockdown began. Fauré’s Dolly Suite, Debussy’s Petite Suite, and Ravel’s Mother Goose are among them.
As with all the duet music these two play, there’s an essential oddity about this album. Most great duet partnerships are a coming together of two musicians, each of whom has the exclusive possession of their instrument or their voice. Osborne and Lewis share a single piano, as the music they play is for two pianists seated at one keyboard. Each is in effect condemned to play only half an instrument.
It’s an odd sort of servitude, and I wonder what made them do it. “There is a lot of wonderful music for the combination,” says Lewis, 48. “A lot of it has a domestic quality. In the 19th-century it was a way for people to get to know symphonies and quartets in their own home, by playing them in four-handed piano arrangements. But it’s not all domestic. Schubert’s Grand Duo is an immense piece, it’s around 45 minutes long, as big as a symphony.”
But their latest album is hardly immense? “No, it’s all exquisite little miniatures,” says Osborne, 49. “It’s part of the French tradition of little character pieces which goes way back. I especially love Mother Goose, it’s so perfectly simple.
“It’s hard to think of another piece which expresses such powerful feelings with just a few notes. Also, it makes such a great change from really challenging virtuoso music. You can just relax and actually enjoy yourself.”
I imagine that as with a pantomime horse, one end of the piano is definitely more appealing to occupy than the other. How do they decide who takes which end? “Well it really is like tossing a coin,” says Lewis. “We just share it out evenly. Steven actually requested the top part in Ravel’s Mother Goose because he loves the piece so much, but that happens rarely. The thing is that whoever takes control of the bottom part also takes control of the pedals.”
“Yeah,” Osborne adds. “So if you’re a control freak you always want the bottom part.” Does playing only half an instrument make life hard in unusual ways? “I think technically, piano duets is one of the very hardest mediums,” says Osborne. “It’s enormously hard to coordinate. All your decades of experience prepare you for creating an entire texture with two hands, but here you have to create half a texture.
“So it feels completely unnatural. It’s very hard to get the loudness levels right. If your job is to play quiet accompanying notes it’s especially hard, because if those are the only notes you’re playing then you want to play up a bit because otherwise you feel you’re not actually doing anything. But then you end up playing too loudly. I remember when we started, each of us was always telling the other to play quieter!”
Lewis mentions other problems that the listener might not even notice. “There are odd moments where our hands cross over, and even moments where a composer might write the same note in both parts. Also, there’s this whole issue about how pianists find their sound. If you listen to ten pianists playing the same piano one after another, you’ll hear ten different sounds. A pianist has a certain kind of sound in mind, and through a combination of articulating different layers of the music in different ways, and using the pedal, he or she will try to find that sound. But when you’re playing duets each pianist has to try and find the same sound as the other.”
Is it very hard for the person sitting on the right-hand side not to be in control of the pedals? “I must say you feel pretty naked up there when you don’t have that control,” says Lewis, “but that means a lot of trust is involved, because in effect you have to rely on the other person to pedal for you.” Osborne agrees. “When you’re pedalling you’re not just doing it for yourself but for both of you, and sometimes that feels incredibly unnatural”
The other difficulty is that the pair haven’t played together for a decade. However, both agree that it was like second nature. “I think it’s important that Paul and I have very similar musical values,” says Osborne. “Neither of us likes showing off, we both like musical subtlety. I think that helps a lot.”
And listening to this new CD, it really feels like a meeting of two finely balanced, subtle musical minds.
French Duets perf. Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne is released on Hyperion on Friday
Hear Steven Osborne's 50th birthday concert at the Wigmore Hall on March 12. wigmore-hall.org.uk
