Anderson & Roe “Overlay” Familiar Classics

The piano duo of Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe presented one of the last performances in Herbst Theatre before the lockdown conditions were imposed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Their last recital for Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) took place on February 15, 2020. Last night they made their first “post-pandemic” CMSF appearance. As in the past, high spirits reigned over the course of the evening with their usual innovative twists on familiar repertoire selections.

Because those twists are anticipated by those that have attended past performances, they have given the technique a label. They assign the title “Overlay” to their imaginative techniques of embellishment. The two Overlay selections on last night’s program were applied to two of the pieces under Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances title. In “order of appearance,” those were the second (in E minor) from the Opus 72 collection and the fifth (in A major) from the Opus 46 collection. These made for a delightfully adventurous departure from the “original scores,” complete with each of the pianists adding some vocalizations.

These two selections were preceded by a “straight” account of “Silent Woods” the fifth composition in Dvořák’s Opus 68 collection, From the Bohemian Forest. A third Overlay provided the first encore of the evening, based on Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” The other “unembellished” selection on the program was the first, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 448 sonata for two pianos in D major.

Nevertheless, the program abounded with richly developed accounts of music from a variety of genres. More often than not, embellishment was a matter of “pulling out all the stops” (so to speak), as in rethinking the final movement of Mozart’s K. 331 piano sonata in A major into “Ragtime alla Turca.” Particularly impressive was their ability to command the rich orchestration of the “Daybreak” episode from Maurice Ravel’s score for the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé.” Ironically, the was the one piece on the program that involved an arranger other than Anderson and/or Roe. Vyacheslav Gryaznov took on Ravel’s score, but Anderson and Roe took on his transcription with jaw-dropping technique.

The duo could also deliver a subtle insight or two in their own arrangements. They closed out their program with four selections from Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story. However, they were not afraid to remind listeners that “Somewhere” was a product of not-so-subtle appropriation. For those that thought the music was Bernstein’s own invention, Anderson and Roe were helpful by providing an interjection of the passage from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 73 (fifth, know as “Emperor”) piano concerto in E-flat major that “inspired” that upward leap that began the “Somewhere” tune. (As Johannes Brahms said, “Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel!”)

The third Overlay was followed by two more encores. The first of these presented the duo at its most lyrical in their arrangement of “Mondnacht” (moon night), the fifth song in Robert Schumann’s Opus 39 Liederkreis song cycle. The was the calm before the stormy no-holds-barred account of the “Sabre Dance” movement from Aram Khachaturian’s score for the ballet Gayane.