Pianorama IV

Pianorama is a recurring festival at Konserthuset Stockholm where the piano plays the main role in all concerts. Many of Sweden’s leading pianists will appear, as well as some of Sweden’s most prominent percussionists and string musicians. This year’s festival has a special focus on music for two pianos and four hands.

“Double the piano means piano with extra everything! The challenge is to play so that it sounds like two pianos together, yet still like a dialogue between two discernible voices,” says initiator and artistic director Roland Pöntinen.

In this concert, pianists Bengt Forsberg and David Huang take an almost hundred-year-old journey through French music, from Chabrier’s La belle époque-infused Trois valses romantiques, to Dutilleux’s harmonically exploratory Figures de résonances. En blanc et noir – In Black and White – was composed during World War I, a period that had a powerful impact on Debussy. Nevertheless, he insisted that it was simply pure music: “the colours and the expression of the music are about nothing more than the resonance of the piano itself.”

At this concert we will also hear music by Tailleferre and Poulenc. They were both members of the composer group Les Six and wanted to see the conclusion of Impressionism and late Romanticism.