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RECITAL REVIEW
Four Hands, Two Minds August 4, 2002
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By Vera Breheda
Four-hand piano duets can be great fun when the pair are sight-reading and just playing for themselves; performing them in concert presents great challenges. Sunday afternoon's Old First Concert of mostly Schubert and Beethoven duets by Mack McCray and Gwendolyn Mok exposed the joys and difficulties of duet playing.
Four-hand playing is essentially an intimate art form in which the element that seems most important is the ability of both pianists to defer to each other while holding one's own. McCray's and Mok's performance brought out their strengths as two extraordinary solo pianists, and their weakness as a somewhat incompatible team. Especially when McCray had the bottom part, problems of balance were noticeable.
Mok's beautiful, singing delicate touch was often overpowered by too much bass. One must remember that the Viennese piano of Beethoven's and Schubert's time had a robust but less heavy bass than our modern piano. Overall, in those earlier pianos, there was a greater sweetness in the sound quality with a very clear, crisp articulation.
The first half of the program included Schubert's very late Grand Rondo in A major, D951, and the four distinctly different polonaises, D.824. Although played with a fine rhythmic sense, a little more light-hearted, sweet giddiness would have brought out the “Viennese” in these pieces. Mok's and McCray's ensemble playing was often exemplary, but sometimes suffered in moments of rubatos and ritardandos.
The music's anticipating, in one of the two piano parts, the other pianist's phrase while maintaining an element of surprise and delight came through in Beethoven's dramatic, almost comical, March no.3 in D major. Beethoven has a penchant for taking off on an aria from a Mozart opera, as was reminiscent here, “La mia Dorabelle capace non è” from Cosi Fan Tutte. The second half of the program was devoted to Schubert's large-scale “serious” work, the Grand Duo in C Major. It was Schumann who first voiced the opinion that the Duo was a symphony in disguise. Harmonically, Schubert exploits mediant, or third-related keys in order to broaden the structure. The finale begins with a dramatic held dominant octave, an idea that Schubert was to use again in the first of the four impromptus D.899, as well as in the last movement of the B flat major sonata. It also has as powerful a development section as Schubert ever wrote, and its coda contains one of the most startling uses of the Neapolitan key, with the main theme appearing, as if in slow motion, in C sharp minor. Listening to the performance of the Grand Duo, I was more aware of two separate two-handed pianists playing, rather than one sound created by four distinct hands, or two players collaborating and interplaying with each other, oblivious of the self but striving towards an integrated whole. The Marche Militaire encore was played with spirit and unanimity.
(Vera Breheda is a pianist who has served on the faculties of Indiana University, Humboldt State, Diablo Valley and Los Medanos colleges.)
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