The Kanazawa-Admony Piano Duo performs works inspired by tragic love at the Eden-Tamir Music Center Ein Kerem, Jerusalem

 

Tami Kanazawa, Yuval Admony (Clemens Wortmann)

For "Love Stories in Two Pianos", a concert of the Eden-Tamir Music Center's Glorious Sound of the Piano series on June 3rd 2023, duo pianists Tami Kanazawa and Yuval Admony performed works all based on love…an idyllic subject you would think for a morning concert on a sunny spring day in the magical Jerusalem village of Ein Kerem…  

 

The program opened with some of Johannes Brahms' "Liebeslieder Waltzer" (Love Song Waltzes) Op.52 (premiered Vienna,1870) a collection comprising eighteen songs originally scored for four vocal soloists (or choir SATB) and two pianos. Brahms chose to set poems from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s "Polydora", an 1855 German anthology of folk song texts from many countries. Due to the work's popularity and playability, many versions and transcriptions of the "Liebeslieder Waltzes" exist, including the setting we heard for piano duet (without voices), in which minor additions and intricacies were added to the original piano lines. Kanazawa and Admony conjured up the vividly pastoral texts relating to birds, stars, the moon and nature in general in playing that was both sensitive and subtle - at times reticent, gently lyrical and singing, positive and genial, even melancholy, at others, hearty, free-spirited and lavish. Their playing addressed each individual miniature, all of which deal with matters of the heart. And how birdlike and evocative No. 6 "A small, pretty bird" emerged. Much has been told of Brahms' amorous letdowns and his long-term friendship with Robert Schumann's wife Clara. However, it seems he had developed feelings for Robert and Clara’s daughter Julie. Distraught at Julie’s 1869 engagement, he completed his op. 52 "Liebeslieder Walzer" the same year.  

 

As to Franz Liszt's duet transcriptions of his own symphonic poems, they are not to be viewed merely as arrangements but as works that exist alongside the symphonic forms. Indeed, Liszt very often worked on the orchestral and two-piano versions simultaneously. At the Ein Kerem concert, we heard "Orpheus", Symphonic Poem No.4. The piece had its genesis in a performance of Gluck's opera "Orfeo ed Euridice" (1762), which Liszt produced in 1854 when music director of the Weimar Court. The composer was inspired by the depiction of Orpheus as seen on an Etruscan vase at the Louvre Museum and by the notion that Orpheus had a civilizing effect on humanity. With consummate teamwork, Kanazawa and Admony recreated the dilemma and struggle of the fateful Orpheus and Eurydice fable, represented on Liszt's broad canvas, with its pungent dissonances, and in the musical language of the 1850s, but also in pensive, fragile moments, showing Liszt at his most delicate, as well as at his most harmonically inventive. 

 

Liszt's "Réminiscences de Don Juan" (S. 418) is an opera fantasy for piano on themes from Mozart's 1787 opera "Don Giovanni". Composed in 1841 and published as a two-piano version in 1877, the piece is no paraphrase of the popular Mozart opera, rather, an interpretation, even a portrayal of the title character as seen through Liszt's eyes (understandably, the result being anything but condemnation of Don Juan's licentious life!)  Although extreme in technical demands, indeed, considered to be one of Liszt's most taxing works (Ferruccio Busoni referred to  the "Réminiscences" as carrying "almost symbolic significance as the highest point of pianism") Kanazawa and Admony concerned themselves with presenting the many-layered weave of the work that  draws on three themes from Mozart's opera, opening with the intense depiction of Don Juan's eventual confrontation with the flames of hell as vivified in sinister timbres of the pianos' lower register. As to the much-loved aria melodies threaded throughout, the artists presented them with cantabile good cheer and warmth. One could not object to the gentle humming of these jewels as was heard in the hall.

 

“The radioactive fallout from "West Side Story" must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune following the work's New York premiere. Considered by many to be Broadway's greatest contribution to the arts and Leonard Bernstein's most memorable work, "West Side Story" (conceived by Jerome Robbins, lyrics: Stephen Sondheim, based on a book by Arthur Laurents) was composed between 1955 and 1957. In 1961, Bernstein chose numbers from the score for his "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story", overseeing the orchestration carried out by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. Performing John Musto's arrangement for two pianos, Kanazawa and Admony gave expression to the tragic love story set against the rivalry between two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds in New York's Upper West Side, to its tensions, to its slick undertones, devious characters and to its fragile, disarming tenderness. With strategic collaboration and consummate mastery, the artists presented the work's extravagant canvas, one rich and candid in jazzy rhythms, in temperament and moods, all coloured with dissonances and cross-rhythms, highlighting Bernstein's sophisticated writing. And how poignantly each of the memorable songs emerged, threaded between sensitively wrought transitions.

 

Remaining in the seething back alleys of America, the artists performed Percy Granger's "Fantasy on Porgy and Bess". Considered by many to be America’s first great opera, "Porgy and Bess" composed by George Gershwin (libretto: DuBose Heyward, lyrics: Ira Gershwin) tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street beggar living in the slums of Charleston. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent, possessive lover, and Sportin' Life, her drug dealer. Kanazawa and Admony's performance called attention to Grainger's profuse and daring setting - its virtuosic two-piano "orchestration", complete with bell- and xylophone effects and its sultry, tough, noble and tender moods. The duo's playing of Gershwin's timeless melodies, one gorgeous, sparkling tune soaring up to meet another, created a pageant of intense human emotions, as the artists invited the audience to join them for the ride. 

 

Always informative and entertaining, Prof. Admony introduced each of the works. The stories of love represented here ended tragically, but the works written around them made for an elaborate and colourful program and  engaging performance. Real-life partners Tami Kanazawa and Yuval Admony, a piano duo for almost 30 years, perform internationally, take part in music festivals and were co-founders of the Israel International Piano Duo Festival, of which Yuval Admony is the artistic director. They conduct piano duo master-classes in Canada, Korea and Japan and are adjudicators of solo and chamber music competitions in Italy and Israel.