Klavierduo huber/thomet

Monolithen

(Concept Wergo)

There's a real rarity on this new disc of piano duets and music for two pianos, performed by the Swiss piano duo team of Susanne Huber and Andre Thomet. Over 40 years ago, while going through a big Debussy phase and reckoning I would be the man to crack Debussy's structural secrets (ha!), I came across En Blanc et Noir, a beautiful work for two pianos, written in 1915, and very influenced by wartime experience. There's something lonely about this piece. I've never heard it in concert, and the Swiss duo capture its elusive moods on this recording. Alas, they fail to do that in Stravinsky's four-hand version of The Rite Of Spring, which has clarity in its teeming textures and loads of incisive articulation in its delivery, but seems to have missed the elemental, volcanic, eruptive nature of the music. It's almost over-calculated in its precision and lacks completely the sense of physical shock and wild abandon that so grips listeners by the throat.

Michael Tumelty