A review of the concert on April 19, 2003 by Gary Lemco.
A moment of awed silence, then a collective, resounding “Wow!” and a standing ovation filled the hall at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose Saturday, courtesy the Steinway Society The Bay Area, April 19, as duo-pianists Ning-Wu Du and Helen Sim concluded their only encore, Lutoslawski’s punishing Variations on a Theme of Paganini, a surreal treatment of Paganini’s A Minor Caprice that requires blistering filigree, exact syncronicity, and a huge sonority, musical elements this husband and wife piano duet packs in spades.
The art of the piano duet has a tenuous life in the world of chamber music, with only a select few having achieved international fame in the medium: Gold and Fizdale; Vronsky and Babin; the Lebeque sisters; Abraham Chasins and Constance Keene, if you care to go back a generation; and then on even further, with the Lhevinnes and the Casadesus families’ brandishing a style all their own. Du and Sim bring a slick and suave finesse to their music-making, proferring a vibrant patina of sound and sure-fisted rhythmic variety. After an opening group of Brahms Hungarian Dances, Du and Sim went straight for the entre, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in an arrangement by Hugo Ulrich. If the Brahms had a sense of flexible rhythms and playful rubato, the Beethoven had a directness and concision that exposed the plasticitry and economy of the composer’s musical means. If the two-piano writing eliminates some of the orchestral color, it nevertheless retains those cascading and explosive transformations of the original rhythm and jarring dissonances that dominate the entire work. In the course of a volatile and scintillating reading, we also experienced moments of great intimacy and mounting drama, a rendering the equal of the great orchestral colorists in this music, from Kleiber to Celibidache.
The second half of the concert offered shorter works that did not produce an anticlimax after the Beethoven, but a kind of extended aperitif: Rachmaninov’s Suite No. 2, Op. 17; Milhaud’s vibrant Scaramouche Suite; and Three Preludes by George Gershwin. The Rachmaninov came across as Schumann and Chopin, cross-fertilized by an imaginative dose of Russian nostalgia and orthodox liturgy. Each of the four sections was played as an etude in filigree and dynamics, rife with references to the composer’s own sets of preludes and etudes-tableaux.
The Milhaud suite, his most popular two-piano work, is French chanson alchemized with Brazilian samba and jazz from The Cotton Club. The fluid union of blues and jazzy, rag and stride rhythms culminated in Gershwin’s Preludes, in which the lovely Andante echoed the tender moments from Porgy and Bess. Happily, the microphones were on for this recital to be recorded, so posterity, as well as those in attendance, can recall this thrilling duo in glorious form.
