I had forgotten how eclectically buoyant is Poulenc’s Concerto for 2 Pianos (1932), having first heard it thirty years ago via the old RCA LP with Whitmore and Lowe and orchestra under Mitropoulos. Stravinsky and French cabaret style merge in an alternately percussive and lyrical color mix, tinted by echoes of the Balinese gamelan and the arioso of Massenet. Witty and pungent, the concerto allows Quattro Mani (Four Hands) any number of brisk frolics through Poulenc’s airy, pentatonic, musical boulevards. A kind of Alberti sensibility inhabits the Larghetto, Mozart dallying in the Tuillerie Gardens. The last movement rondo might owe something to Saint-Saens, a peppy dance fraught with garlic and vinegar. It’s all very charming, idiomatic Poulenc, the ensemble under maestro Yoo generously endowed with vivid colors.
Darius Milhaud’s imaginative Second Concerto (1961) clearly takes its cue from Bartok’s 1937 Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion. Set for two pianos and four percussionists who play a variety of instruments, the piece exudes an oriental exoticism fused with Parisian experimentalism on the order of Edgard Varese. Tinkling colors drip from the skies. This is Alice in Wonderland music, a kaleidoscopic dream in dialogue that would appeal to Timothy Leary. The influence of Bartok’s “night music” permeates Milhaud’s Tendre et ardent slow movement. Intimate, modal weavings of the two pianos suddenly suffer a violent upheaval marked fff from the percussion midway in the journey; but the peaceful keyboard colloquy continues even through richly textured percussive sounds–including gong, tambourine, drums, and celeste–until it closes pppp. The finale has a bit of Saudades do Brasil about it, brazen, splashy folk music in plucky colors. Great side drum!
The Bartok Concerto for 2 Pianos (1943) is a direct re-casting of his Sonata (1937), which, in its own terms, is as revolutionary as anything from Bartok’s idol, Beethoven. Few works pay so much attention to timbre and color elements as this work, with its requirement that cymbals be played five different ways. Yoo invokes some primal energy from his ensemble to meet the flamboyant, intense and dissonant runs from Quattro Mani. The climax of the first movement occurs in a complex fugue that runs both through the keyboards and percussion section. Eerie night music for the Lento, ma non troppo leads to a kinetic 2/4 movement Allegro no troppo. The xylophone becomes as busy as the keyboard principals. Though the music ends softly, fingernail on the cymbal, we feel as though we have been privy to fierce emotions filtered via Beethoven’s Op. 127 Quartet.
–Gary Lemco
