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Music Monday | The Sisters Who Took Two Pianos to the World | June 8, 2026
- Jun 8
- 2 min read
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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 than fifty years later, the New York Times has called them simply “the best piano duo in front of an audience today.” Their path to fame had an unlikely turning point. In 1980, they recorded George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for two pianos and sold more than half a million copies — a staggering number for a classical recording. Overnight, the Labèque sisters were not just recital favorites; they were stars. But rather than rest on that success, they pushed further, commissioning works from Philip Glass, Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, and Bryce Dessner, collaborating with rock musicians and jazz artists, and performing on stages from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl. Today’s video brings them to the Waldbühne — Berlin’s beloved open-air amphitheater carved into a hillside forest — for a sold-out concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. The piece is Francis Poulenc’s irresistible Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor, one of the great showpieces of the two-piano repertoire. Poulenc composed it in 1932 and it brims with wit, nostalgia, and sheer delight, drawing on Mozart, jazz, Balinese gamelan, and the music halls of Paris all at once. It is the kind of piece that makes you grin from beginning to end. Watch the Labèque sisters not just play the piece but inhabit it — trading phrases, stealing glances, occasionally smiling at one another as if sharing a private joke the rest of us are lucky enough to overhear. This is what two pianos were made for. |
