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