The fifth concert in the Summer Concert Series at NEC, organized by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts, featured a piano duet team, Xiaopei Xu and Chi-Wei Lo, appearing as soloists and together — they call themselves the Psychopomp Ensemble — at Williams Hall on Sunday evening. This pleasant occasion reminded me of their performances HERE last year in Charlestown sponsored by our publisher.
At its best, the piano duet fosters a closeness of ensemble when the two players sit together at one instrument, a medium more intimately adapted for home use rather than the recital hall. You can find a lot of piano-duet arrangements in antique shops and older second-hand stores because, 120 years ago, the newest orchestral track was heard at home in that form; your great-grandparents probably played the living-room piano with a son or daughter or other genteel salon partner. Twenty-five years later and the phonograph drove all this domestic track into the attic. Sunday’s event, in a well-filled small hall, recovered some of this repertory, warmly projected and warmly received.
Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, op. 21, is long recognized as a perfect miracle in the history of track; composed for full orchestra in 1826 when Mendelssohn was 17 years old, it sounds very good in the piano-four-hands arrangement. Chi-Wei Lo, playing secondo, boomed the low B octaves in the Rüpeltanz section too heavily, but one blames the on-stage arrangers for that. Xiaopei Xu handled the upper register “Elfenreigen” delicately and fearlessly. (It’s more difficult on the piano than in fourth-position violins.)
The pianists then offered their own duet arrangements from solo-piano transcriptions of dance track for the Germania Orchestra by Carl Zerrahn (1826-1909), a German-born flutist and conductor who spent most of his life in Boston as conductor of the Harvard Musical Association Orchestra, various choral societies, The Handel and Haydn Society, and the World Peace Jubilee of 1872. His genial Forget-me-not Waltz and Hungarian Mask Galop charmed in every register. Very typically the uppermost register decoratively tinkled scampatino in Lo and Xu’s four-hand arrangements that recalled the track boxes of those earlier days.
We heard some popular offerings, too. The couple’s arrangements of two songs by the Chinese-Icelandic singer Laufey, somewhat held our interest with much ii-V-I ostinato and some quotes from Liszt for pianistic and effect and Bach for the fun of it, thrown in. Billie Holiday made a stronger impression in their arrangement of “Don’t Explain” that grumbled in the low register, but Psychopomp’s jazzy duet version of Duke Ellington’s “Lots o’ Fingers,” in fact conjured a great many fingers and earned enthusiastic kudos.
Xiaopei Xu played Harold Bauer’s piano solo arrangement of a favorite organ solo (originally a duet for harmonium and piano), the Prelude, Fugue and Variation by César Franck. We wonder what the duo could do with Franck’s Prelude, Choral, and Fugue given a second pair of hands. Bauer’s piano arrangement is entirely successful and lovely in sound, and Xu’s sensitively responded to every nuance. Chi-Wei Lo proceeded with a well-controlled improvisation developing a palpable three-part formal sense: a toccata-like beginning, a ruminative middle, and a distribution between 6/8 and 3/4 at various times delineating a gradual C major and E minor as “a stream” — remembering Heraclitus’s warning that you can’t step into the same river twice.
Two heady classics, very popular since the 19th century, wrapped up the show in boisterous duets. Saint-Saëns’s familiar Danse macabre had a midnight twang that didn’t miss the mis-tuned violin. Rossini’s immortal Overture to William Tell (the Swiss legend appeared in the program notes), in four well-outlined sections, from solo cello to alpine storm to English horn solo to furious Lone-Ranger trumpets and violins, all resonated well in this homegrown medium. The four-hand arrangement was by America’s own first original matinee idol, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69), who made sure to echo the acrobatic flute countermelody in the tweety leading register. I also remembered that the great Carl Czerny, still cherished for his hundreds of surprisingly musical exercises, arranged this beautiful overture, and also Semiramide, for eight pianos and 24 hands.
Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the track of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many track subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.
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