Four Hands: Australian music for Piano - Viney-Grinberg Piano Duo
This recording explores the unique creative world of two pianists collaborating at one piano. The music performed is all by Australian composers, and was written in recent decades. Music for one piano four-hands, as distinct from pianists performing on two pianos, goes back to the early years of the instrument itself; Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel all wrote significant original music for what the scholar Edward Cone has called ‘four-handed monsters’, a term that evokes both the genre’s runaway historical popularity and its striking visual impression.
The five Australian compositions on this disc grow and build on that tradition, with ambitious largescale works of complexity and virtuosity, as well as miniatures that deal with the interior world of the human heart and mind. Despite the diversity of music on this disc – a fascinating variety of responses to the musical opportunities afforded by piano four-hand performance – there is also a unifying thread of dynamism and spirited energy.
