Duo Walachowski

The southern Frenchman Darius Milhaud joined the Groupe des Six in Paris. This bold artistic clique of the 1920s ventured into a music of everyday life, of small forms and prosaic gestures. Milhaud's "Scaramouche" fits in with this, as it is based on music that was intended for the theater. In 1937, the composer had composed incidental music to a comedy by Molière, which he then rewrote as a suite for two pianos. He did not choose Molière as the title, but the most famous Italian actor in the France of the Sun King, who became so famous in the role of Scaramouche that he was given this nickname. The Scaramouche Suite came about in a curious way: Two female pianists commissioned a work from Milhaud. However, Milhaud had little desire or inclination to write something new and resorted without further ado to the freshly composed incidental music - just like Bach and Handel before him. This compulsory exercise resulted in one of his most popular works.
Suitable for dance and Spanish, was another commission. But only a genius could come up with the idea of squaring the circle in notes: To write music that, despite its 17-minute repetition, does not lose its content, but rather becomes a catchy tune. Ravel's Boléro does just that. A snare drum marks the beginning. It strikes the rhythm, which then has to be repeated around two hundred times exactly - drummers are said to have fallen into a trance. For the pianist duo, this means 339 bars of maximum concentration, for the audience a single fascination. Sources: www.kammermusikfuehrer.de; www.guerzenich-orchester.de; www.nzz.ch

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sonata for two pianos, D major KV 448
Franz Schubert: Fantasy in F minor op.103 (D 940)
Maurice Ravel: Bolero (arrangement by the composer for two pianos)
Georg Gershwin: Three Preludes for two pianos (Arr. George Stone)
Darius Milhaud: Scaramouche op. 165b for two pianos, et al.

Anna Walachowski, piano
Ines Walachowski, piano