Three Classics for Four Hands—Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung
Alessio Bax, Photo credit: Marco Borggreve / Lucille Chung
Carl Sandburg once said “nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected.” In your own life, consider that non-milestone birthday party which turned out one of your best ever. Or the new or vintage movie no one knows about that you absolutely love. Or that musician whose performance made you experience a Beethoven sonata in a new way.
A new musical experience seemed hardly in the offing when ALIVEmusica and the Howland Chamber Music Circle presented the first performance in its spring chamber concert series at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY Sunday evening (January 24th). Promoted as a piano concert for four hands by husband-and-wife team of Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung prompted expectations of a high-toned version of Ferrante and Teicher, the popular piano duo known for florid, middle-brow performances of light classical, film, and pop music melodies.
Which couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only was their presentation performed on just one piano, but Bax and Chung delivered the music seated side by side. If that sounds like an incredible acrobatic act in terms of flying fingers and overlapping chords, it is. As Bax remarked during intermission about four hands alternating very quickly over a keyboard, “sometimes on the same notes, the possibility of something going wrong and accidents to happen are very, very high and keeps [the performance] very, very interesting.”
Both artist’s credentials to meet the demands performing such musical gymnastics are exceptional. Alessio Bax is a piano prodigy who graduated with honors from the music conservatory in his hometown of Bari, Italy at fourteen. After studying in France with Francois-Joël Thiollier, he tutored under Joaquín Achúcarro at the Chigiana Academy in Siena, then followed his mentor to Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, Texas. In 2019 he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston and became a Steinway artist, touring and recording frequently with great acclaim for Signum Classics.
Lucille Chung’s career has followed a similar arc. Debuting at the age of ten with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, she received degrees from the Curtis Institute and Juilliard Schools of Music before she turned twenty. Cited by Gramophone magazine for her “stylish and refined performances,” she also studied under Achúcarro at the Meadows School and has gone on to win first prize at the Stravinsky International Piano Competition while performing world-wide more than 70 major orchestras.
Although rare among concert presentations, Bax and Chung’s four-hand technique is more than a gimmick. A whole sub-genre of classical piano music consists of original music composed for four and even six hands. Many well-known composers including Ravel, Schubert, Dvorak, and Liszt created pieces specifically for this sub-genre, but most classical compositions of any importance are routinely arranged and transcribed into music “à quatre mains” (for four hands). This latter version is how Bax first encountered the score of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the centerpiece of the night’s performance, after hearing a performance of the ballet as an eight-year-old music student in his native Bari.
The appeal of this form resembles reproductions of successful pop music works on acoustic guitar. Stripping away their production overlays enables performers to get at the essence of a work by bringing out colors and effects otherwise obscured by amplified guitars, drum machines, and stringed accompaniments. Together, Chung and Bax through this sometimes frenetic technique revealed the characteristic effects of the night’s works along with unexpected insights that a solo, two-handed piano performance fails to capture.
The evening’s program consisted of three works: Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of Faun); Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and Johannes Brahm’s Hungarian Dance no. 6, a lineup whose underlying “ballet theme,” as Chung characterized it, was intended to bring out the “dance and movement” inherent in each piece. Bax went a step further by stating their performance, particularly of Petrushka, was intended to “stretch the possibilities of piano for four hands to its limits.”
In that they succeeded. Their opening piece, Debussy’s Prelude, captured all the nuance and subtlety contained within the dreamy glissandos and cascading chromaticism of the French composer’s seminal work which composer and conductor Pierre Boulez reportedly considered the beginning of modern music. With Chung seated before the left side of the keyboard and Bax before the right, the two of them provided a study in contrast of piano technique, Bax’s hand movements appeared steadier and more controlled, Chung’s more florid and dynamic. Together, their contrapuntal style captured the dreamy dynamic of a faun caught up in his reveries on a summer’s day, an image Vaslav Nijinski brought to life and controversial acclaim in his short ballet performance in 1912.
Where the Debussy work is short, dreamy, and evocative, the Stravinsky piece is long, jumpy, and disjointed, appropriate for a work based on the escapades of the puppet Petrushka, the Russian variant of Punch in Britain, Pulcinella in Italy, Kasperle in Germany—trickster, rebel, and wife-beater in any language. Switching sides on the piano bench, the couple attacked the work with gusto, their hands flying over and across the keyboard, missing or eluding each other’s fingers by a matter of inches or tenths of seconds in a remarkable display of virtuosity and coordination. Yet, despite or perhaps because of the sense of imminent physical mayhem in the raucous parts, Bax and Chung captured the physical retribution and mayhem lurking within the piece that so enchanted Bax’s boyhood imagination.
For their encore, Bax and Chung switched sides once again and performed the sixth in the series of 15 Bavarian dances that Brahms created especially for à quatre mains. Here their mood was joyous and celebratory, the czardas or Hungarian folk dance on which Brahms based this short piece, a fitting close for a couple whirling in their enjoyment of a life together.
Despite the mastery and joy, however, not everything was perfect in their performance. Though their four-hand style often brought out unexpected colors in each work, those two pairs of hands sometimes seemed to cancel out tonalities rather than enhancing them. Whether this resulted from inadequate transcription (doubtful) or their combined techniques (more doubtful) is difficult to tell, but the impact of a section in Debussy’s Prelude usually warbled by flutes in a full orchestra felt underwhelming at best.
Consequently, if you asked whether two sets of hands at the piano doubles the pleasure, the answer would be a qualified yes. All in all, the performance of these two piano virtuosos made for an enjoyable evening with their rare and refreshing approach to several classical music standards. Seeing and hearing two sets of hands darting across the keyboard in acrobatic fashion created an unforgettable—and unexpected—experience of auditory entertainment that did Sandburg’s dictum proud. What more could you ask?
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