Camille Saint-Saëns: The Carnival of the Animals
Educational Project

This will be the work for this year's educational projects. Less demanding than last year's "The Selfish Giant" by Stefan Heucke, it requires an ensemble of minimum 9 musicians besides the 2 pianos. We will perform this work with a narrator at schools abroad in each country's language as well as foreign (i.e. in English for the English classes in Holland).

Francis Poulenc: Concerto for 2 pianos and orchestra in D minor
Alfred Schnittke: Concerto for piano-4 hands and chamber orchestra
Season's New Concertos

Poulenc's Concerto is one of the most appreciated Concertos of the piano duo repertoire by audiences and pianists alike. It is a typical work of Poulenc's unique mesmerizing style... full of charming melodies, playful rhythms and of course Poulenc's dissonant, yet witty, harmonies are not missing. Luckily, there is a video recording of this work with Jacques Fevrier and the composer himself playing the pianos under the direction of Georges Prêtre.

Schnittke's Concerto is of a totally different nature, requiring a chamber orchestra of 34 instrumentalists, where all instruments besides strings are solo. The most outstanding is its structure and the perception of sounds. On the whole it reveals a very esoteric dialogue between orchestra and piano. From the very beginning and for quite some time the piano and the orchestra do not go along simultaneously, rather than simply stating their thoughts and conditions. There are moments of extreme sentiment, intense climaxes and abrupt interruptions and interferences between the two.
A text by Schnittke regarding this Concerto follows:
       In 1988 I wrote a work which posed several problems for me, the Concerto for piano duet. One of these problems was in working out its form. Two pianists had to fulfil different functions. After much consideration I found a solution: it begins with extremely marked contrasts and ends with a temporary reconciliation. Perhaps some time I will develop this idea further.
       The idea of a concerto for piano duet is not new but it was very rarely used. There are, of course, reasons why this is so - basically, it is a thankless task sharing an instrument with someone else (and annoying each other in doing so). However, there are advantages too - a wider spectrum of sound, consisting of many more layers, can be obtained from the instrument; it is as if it were a monologue from two people rolled into one. This feeling that somebody is always playing on (even if they sometimes pause) has influenced the aural illusion of the double concerto from the very start of its development.
       Now it is finished and once again it turned into a form which I (and also others after Liszt) have used on a number of occasions, a work consisting of several movements in one movement, beginning and ending slowly and in between striving to depict a world of sound full of contrast - but it is interesting that for the same question repeated several times a different answer always comes up. The form turned out differently this time too - with the predominantly scherzo-like development of lyrical recitative-like material which initially hardly showed any tendency to develop in that direction and with a culmination full of surreal drama. I wonder what result would be achieved the next time this question is posed - if indeed this ever happens?