Today’s Music Monday comes with a little extra pride, because Dranoff commissioned it. In 1991, we asked the great American composer William Bolcom, a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most inventive musical minds of our time, to write a new work for two pianos. He gave us “Recuerdos.” “Recuerdos,” or “memories,” is a suite of three Latin American dances that sends two pianists chasing each other through a graceful paseo, a sparkling Brazilian chôro, and a lilting Venezuel

Some pieces of music escape the concert hall and come to belong to an entire country. “Danzón No. 2,” by the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, is one of them. Written in 1994 and carried around the world by Gustavo Dudamel and his young Venezuelan musicians, it is so beloved that Mexicans simply call it their second national anthem. Márquez, now 75 and one of Mexico’s most celebrated living composers, built it from the danzón, a sultry, syncopated ballroom dance born in Cuba

“The Planets” is one of the most famous orchestral works ever written, its swaggering Mars and soaring Jupiter echoing through concert halls and film scores for a century. But here is what most people never learn: Gustav Holst wrote it for two pianos first. Holst suffered from severe neuritis, a painful nerve condition in his right arm that made holding a pen an agony. So, he composed “The Planets” at the keyboard instead, and two devoted colleagues from the girls’ school whe

Few living composers are as interesting as Fazıl Say. Born in Ankara in 1970, the Turkish pianist and composer is a genuine original: classically trained in Germany, equally fluent in jazz, and deeply rooted in the musical heritage of his country. His music can be thunderously virtuosic or achingly still, sometimes both in the same piece. He has also spent much of his career in and out of controversy in Turkey for his outspoken views, which has only deepened the sense that hi

We have featured Katia and Marielle Labèque before, and they are worth every return visit. This time we bring them to you in a piece written expressly for them by one of the most celebrated composers alive. Philip Glass has written twelve concertos, but when he finally turned to two pianos, he had only one duo in mind. Composed for the Labèque sisters in the fall and winter of 2014 and co-commissioned by five of the world’s great orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharm

Johannes Brahms composed his 21 Hungarian Dances originally for piano four hands, basing them on folk melodies he had collected and loved since his early years in Hamburg, where Hungarian Romani musicians had set the city alight. He later arranged several for solo piano and for orchestra, but the four-hand originals have a propulsive, unpolished energy that no other version quite captures. Two pianists locked in together, driving rhythms forward with the kind of abandon that

Jazz, Ravel and a Little Boogie Woogie The Dranoff connection to today’s Music Monday runs unusually deep. Canadian husband and wife duo Marcel and Elizabeth Bergmann were laureates of the 4th Murray Dranoff International Two Piano Competition right here in Miami. Years later, Marcel returned not as a competitor but as a commissioned composer, writing Urban Pulse as the required work for the 10th Dranoff Competition in 2005. And in between, the two served as Artistic Direct

When Two Pianos Meet an Orchestra Francis Poulenc composed his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in 1932 thanks to a commission from the Princess de Polignac, one of the great arts patrons of Paris. It was a romp from the start: witty, irreverent, full of jazz inflections and music hall charm, with a second movement of such unexpected tenderness that audiences hardly knew what had hit them. Poulenc himself said he wanted it to be “gay and not profound.” He succeeded spe

Some piano duos are built in the practice room. This one was built at the Palace of Versailles. When Lang Lang and Gina Alice Redlinger married in June 2019, guests at their reception got something most wedding audiences do not: a live debut performance by two of the world’s finest pianists sitting down at the same keyboard for the very first time. Lang Lang needs little introduction. The Chinese-born pianist who filled in for an ailing soloist at 17 and became an overnight s

On November 23, 1781, in a Viennese drawing room, a twenty-five-year-old Mozart sat down at one of two pianos and played a piece he had written for that evening. His partner was his student Josepha von Auernhammer. The piece was the Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448, the most important work in the history of the genre. Before that night, two-piano music barely existed. The second instrument changed everything: each pianist could now command the full keyboard, tossing m

El Escorial monastery and palace in Spain, a massive granite structure with historical significance. El Escorial is a vast granite monastery and palace built in the northwest mountains of Spain in the 16th century. Severe, monumental, and strangely moving, it is one of the most imposing structures in the world — and it stopped Ernesto Lecuona in his tracks. Cuba’s greatest composer and pianist responded with Ante el Escorial, “Before the Escorial,” a grand and stately piece a

When Two Pianos Meet Dance Stephanie & Saar and Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami, presented by The Moss Center

We have written about Florence Price before, and with Juneteenth just behind us, this is the perfect moment to return to her. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, she became the first Black woman to have a composition performed by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony played her Symphony No. 1 in 1933. After her death, her manuscripts were largely forgotten until discovered by chance in 2009 in a deteriorating house in Illinois — a loss that deprived audienc

Sergei Rachmaninoff spent the summers of his youth on a beloved family estate called Ivanovka, in the Russian countryside southeast of Moscow. It was there that he composed some of his most cherished works, strolling the fields, riding horses, and drawing endless creative energy from the land. When the Russian Revolution swept all that away forever, he left Russia in 1917 and never returned. He spent the rest of his life in exile, mostly in the United States, grieving quietly

The Sisters Who Took Two Pianos to the World If you want to understand what two pianos are capable of in the hands of players who have spent a lifetime thinking of nothing else, look no further than Katia and Marielle Labèque. The French sisters, born just two years apart on the southwestern coast of France near the Basque border, began playing together as toddlers under the watchful eye of their Italian mother — herself a concert pianist and teacher — and never stopped. More

Part II - Born on the Same Day Last Monday we explained how Johannes Brahms (1833) and Pyotr Llyich Tchaikovsky (1840) shared the same birthday but were vastly different men and composers with their own unique styles. Brahms was a German composer and pianist known for adhering closely to the Classical tradition, even though he created his works during the Romantic era. His contemporaries were keenly aware of the outstanding significance of his works, and people spoke of the “

Born on the Same Day Johannes Brahms (1833) and Pyotr Llyich Tchaikovsky (1840) shared the same birthday, but these two titans of classical music could not have been more different. Brahms, a German Romantic composer and pianist, was known for his perfectionism and produced symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral pieces, and more than 200 songs. He is viewed as one of the most prominent composers of symphonies and sonatas in the late 19th century. Tchaikovsky

The Music of Spring Aaron Copland, celebrated as an American treasure, is known for Appalachian Spring, one of his most famous compositions. The work was originally created for a ballet featuring Martha Graham, who titled it after a poem written by Harold Hart Crane. “It had to do with the pioneer American spirit, with youth and spring, with optimism and hope,” Copland wrote. Graham told Copland that she wanted the dance to be “a legend of American living, like a bone structu