Germany's
GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, consisting of Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher, has played a good deal of contemporary music, and even its perspective in this very traditionalist recital is a bit experimental.
Bartók's Concerto for two pianos, percussion, and orchestra (1940), is linked to the other two works on the program in two ways. First, all three works were composed for duos consisting of the composers themselves and good female pianists in their lives: in
Mozart's case his sister Nannerl, and in those of
Liszt and
Bartók their students. Second,
Bartók's student Ditta Pástory became his wife, and they performed not only
Bartók's own concerto together but also the
Mozart Concerto for two pianos and orchestra, K. 365, and in all likelihood even the
Liszt Concert Pathétique for two pianos (without orchestra) that serves here as an intermezzo. The most unusual feature of the album is that the
Mozart is performed with a pair of cadenzas written by
Bartók himself and only recently exhumed from the Florida archive of
Bartók's son
Peter. They're better than the apologetic annotator Rainer Peters indicates; they're neither neo-classic works in Mozartian style nor insertions of
Bartók into
Mozart, but they're closer to the latter, and you can recognize the composer in them. They're highly chromatic, with odd twists and turns that seem to take them to a hopeless distance from the source material before returning to it. Oddly, the first-movement cadenza is for one pianist and the third-movement cadenza for the other. The aim of the whole recital seems to be to put the listener into the frame of mind of
Bartók in the later part of his career. Whether you like this idea or not, the
GrauSchumacher Duo's performances are exceptional: the
Mozart is crisp and appealing, and the
Bartók filled with the rhythmic sense that's essential for the work, with fine contributions from percussionists Franz Schindelbeck and Jan Schlichte and the
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under
Ruben Gazarian. Even with (and maybe even especially because of) its odd element, this would make a good introduction to the duo-piano repertoire.