Two and Eight Pianists on One and Four Pianos

This morning I received through a colleague the URL for a YouTube site presenting a four-hands-on-one-keyboard performance of two the sixteen pieces by Antonín Dvořák collected under the title Slavonic Dances. These had been published as two sets, Opus 46 and Opus 72, each of which collected eight dances. They were published as orchestral pieces but had originally been written for four hands on a single keyboard.

The YouTube video captured a four-hand performance of two of the dances, which took place during the Verbier Festival in July of 2018. The first of these was the second of the Opus 72 dances in the introspective Dumka style. This was followed by the fifth of the Opus 46 set, a livelier “Skočná” setting. The upper-register playing was by Yuja Wang with András Schiff to her left.

Unless I am mistaken, I worked my way through both of these collections with one of my Opera Plaza neighbors; but that was probably over a decade ago. Both sets are trickier than other four-hand compositions that I have encountered. As a result, I particularly enjoyed many of the camera angles through which the eyes could inform the ears of how to negotiate the thick textures of the score. It was easy to appreciate the intensity of focus required of both performers, combined with each being fully aware of what the other was doing.

Eight pianists and to page-turners assemble to take on Rossini’s most familiar music (from the YouTube video being discussed)

The thing about browsing YouTube is that one thing inevitably leads to another. On this particular occasion, I was browsing through the YouTube app provided by my xfinity service. By the time I had entered “yuja wang andras schiff” as a search key, my results included not only the Dvořák URL but also an arrangement of the “March of the Swiss Soldiers,” the finale section of the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell opera (which, for at least some of us, is still associated with The Lone Ranger). The arrangement, which was for eight pianists on four pianos, was probably prepared by Louis Moreau Gottschalk for one of his “monster” concerts.

This was performed at the same Verbier Festival. Wang and Schiff were joined by Evgeny Kissin, Seong-Jin Cho, Mikhail Pletnev, Denis Kozhukhin, Daniil Trifonov, and Sergei Babayan. This was clearly one of those music-for-the-fun-of-it selections; and, towards the final round of the primary theme, one of the pianists seemed to have been weaving “Happy Birthday” into the overall texture.

Ironically, this was not my first encounter with such a massive assembly of pianists. Back when my wife and I would make regular summer trips to the opera performances in Santa Fe, we would usually find time for a few of the Chamber Music Festival performances taking place at the same time. One of those performances involved eight pianists assembled to perform the “Ride of the Valkyries,” the opening music for the third act of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, the second of the four operas constituting Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung).

In both of those eight-hand performances, it was clear that entertainment was the primary objective. To the extent that the arrangement would allow, the pianists were committed to fidelity to the source. At the same time, one got the impression that each of them had to sustain a chuckle, lest it erupt into a belly-laugh. Even the best of pianists should be allowed some raucous humor from time to time!