Pierce & Jonas Piano Duo - 20th Century Masterpieces for 2 Pianos and Orchestra, Vol. 2 (2022)

Two things propelled the re-emergence of the keyboard double concerto. One of them was the revival of interest in early classical and baroque music. The other was the emergence of the piano duo, those popular and virtuosic two-piano teams that captured a big audience and toured widely. Some of these duos became superstars: Vronsky & Babin, Gold & Fizdale, Whittemore & Lowe, Luboshutz & Nemenoff are still remembered as masters of their trade and it is due to them and others like them that this new piano-and-orchestra repertoire was created.

And this is the tradition that Joshua Pierce and Dorothy Jonas have revived and carried forward as the successors to those virtuosic piano duos of another era. It is logical that Pierce & Jonas recorded – and, in some cases unearthed and revived – these 20th century masterpieces for two pianos and orchestra. This 2-CD album, containing six of these works, constitutes the second of two volumes – the first being available on MSR Classics [MS1651]. Along with Volume 1, this release makes a baker’s dozen of works in an extraordinary collection of original compositions for this medium by an extraordinary piano duo working in a grand tradition.

The pundits talk about Neo-Classicism as one of the two leading movements of 20th century music (the other is Expressionism, including twelve-tone music), but the real musical trend was usually something closer to “back to Baroque”. The baroque concerto grosso, the model for the so-called neo-classical concerto, is based on the string orchestra (with continuo) from which the typical soloists are drawn but which may also use winds or even members of the lute family as soloists. The typical form is fast –slow–fast, with the first movement dominated by driving motoric impulses, the second usually lyrical in a baroque arioso style and the finale again motoric, often with a dance-like feel. The concerto started to change in the Classical period and became something quite different in the Romantic period, also mostly in three movements but built rather on symphonic form and contrasting key relationships.

Oddly enough, keyboards were a regular part of the baroque concerto grosso as members of the continuo (the ensemble’s “back-up”) but they rarely appeared as solo instruments. This seems to have changed with J.S. Bach who, in his Leipzig period, organized concerts for Zimmerman’s Coffee House and composed or arranged concertos for one, two, three and even four harpsichord soloists – generally played by Bach himself with his talented sons. In spite of all the possible variables, two was the magic number and the idea of a double concerto persisted into the Classical and early Romantic period. But after Mozart and the young Mendelssohn, the two-piano concerto seems to have faded away, only to be revived in the 20th century with the “back to baroque” form of neo-classicism.

The first 20th century two-piano concerto seems to have been written in 1912 by the German composer Max Bruch, but, for reasons unknown, it was never performed in its original version until long after the composer’s death in 1920. Igor Stravinsky, commonly considered the founder of Neo-Classicism wrote a concerto for two pianos in the 1930s but, curiously, there is no orchestra. Only in the 1920s and 1930s did the idea of the two-piano concerto – with orchestra – start to emerge in the work of composers in the neo-classical or “back to baroque” camp. In short, the works recorded here are not only masterworks of their kind, but also highly innovative for their time.