| Though
they remain renowned as gifted individual artists, for the
past two seasons local audiences have known Ilya Itin and
Francesco Libetta best as duo-piano partners, courtesy of
their appearances at the Miami International Piano Festival.
At this year's festival, the two pianists once again joined
forces Saturday night at the Broward Center's Amaturo Theatre
for two large-scale Russian works, each more familiar in its
version for full orchestra.
Rachmaninoff wrote the two-piano version of his Symphonic
Dances simultaneously with the orchestral version. Even in
his final work, Rachmaninoff was exploring new textures and
paring down his previously sumptuous canvas to a more slender
and pointed palette.
Shorn of its offbeat colors and timbres -- as with the saxophone
solo of the opening movement's lyrical theme -- there's no
doubt that the Symphonic Dances seems somewhat bare-bones
in its two-piano incarnation. Yet without the surface coloration,
the musical values and structural integrity are even more
manifest.
With Itin taking the first piano part, the unanimity of phrasing,
dynamics and rhythm by both players was striking, conveying
the music's deep Russian melancholy in the spectral waltz
of the Andante and the malign appearance of the Dies Irae.
At times perhaps one felt a kind of cool precision when more
fire and a bigger emotional commitment would have been more
effective, particularly in the closing movement. Still, apart
from a final chord in which Libetta fell behind his partner,
the two men played in near symbiotic accord, echoing each
other's phrases and dynamics like aural mirror images.
Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade has long been a favorite work
of Libetta's, so much so that he transcribed the work for
two pianos, an arrangement heard here in its American premiere.
Libetta's arrangement is scrupulously faithful, yet despite
his clear affection for the music, throughout the 45 minutes,
one kept hearing Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestra in one's ear
rather than the sounds conjured by the two pianos.
The delicate lyricism of "The Young Prince and the Young
Princess" emerged largely intact, but the more iridescent
colors sounded decidedly less exotic on the keyboard, as with
Scheherazade's insinuating solo violin as she tells her tales.
Even more than in the Rachmaninoff, one missed the roiling
orchestral canvas and flamboyant scoring of the original.
The performance made a worthy case nonetheless, though the
playing was less airtight than one expects from these artists,
with several digital lapses and moments where the two players
parted ways.
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