Hangverseny a Pleyel Duplazongorán (review)

During the nineteenth century, pianos manufactured by the French firm Pleyel were acclaimed for their delicate action and bright sound and elicited praise from virtuosi Frédéric Chopin, Frédéric Kalk-brenner, and Ignaz Moscheles. The firm was also renowned for developing novel instruments that accommodated changing musical tastes and the demands of professional and amateur pianists alike. An exponent of this innovation is Pleyel’s “double grand” piano, a 1300-pound behemoth that stretches the strings of two pianos, controlled by two diametrically-opposed keyboards, over a single soundboard. The firm constructed fifty double grand pianos for customers who wished to perform music for two pianos but whose salons could not accommodate two grand pianos. Yet, while this instrument was designed as a space-saver, the common soundboard and resonating chamber also resolved a central problem of the piano duo—the need to match the disparate timbres of two separate pianos—by placing the two pianos within a single resonating chamber.

The Pleyel Double Grand Piano in Concert showcases one of only ten extant instruments as well as the vast talents of its owners, the Hungarian pianists Monika Egri and Attila Pertis. Performing as Duo Egri & Pertis, they have devoted nearly two decades to performing, recording, and researching the vast but often overlooked repertoire of nineteenth-century music for two pianos. Among numerous other accomplishments, they have premiered the opera fantasies of virtuoso Sigismund Thalberg, reconstructed Liszt’s first two-piano composition, Großes Konzertstück über Mendelssohns Lieder ohne Wörte (1834), and earned the Grand Prix du Disque for their recording of the complete catalog of Liszt’s two-piano and four-hand opera transcriptions. This concert recording, documenting a 2006 concert at the Royal Palace at Gödöllő, presents a program of familiar compositions arranged for two pianos, two piano standards, and unfamiliar pieces composed specifically for the idiom. Ignaz Pleyel’s Duo in B-Flat Major, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, Op. 36, and Claude Debussy’s Lindaraja provide a glimpse into the breadth of this literature and the variety of compositional approaches that can work with this instrumentation and raise the question of why this repertoire is so rarely heard. The Pleyel double grand piano shines in Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and viewers will be especially pleased with the unrivaled clarity and warmth that the instrument lends this recital staple.

The Pleyel Double Grand Piano in Concert is a testament to Duo Egri & Pertis’s dedication to the two piano repertoire and to their sensitive performance of it. Moreover, the instrument also raises interesting questions about the relationship between musical composition, performance, and technological development during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By bringing this unheralded instrument and these neglected pieces to our attention, The Pleyel Double Grand in Concert will be of interest to viewers with a variety of musical interests and will encourage the exploration of still more forgotten music.