Ian Pace & Frederik Croene

"The two-piano duo of Ian Pace and Frederik Croene offered the highlight of the day’s events: Evan Johnson’s very beautiful 'atendant, souffrir’, lists, little stars. (Though the composer’s programme note was a contender for Private Eye’s 'Pseud’s Corner': 'The piece begins with a proposal for how to proceed, and declines to accept it. Instead, a series of zero points are reached, inhabited and abandoned...') Hovering behind the fragmentary material, the composer writes, is Philopoctus de Caserta’s 14th century motet 'En atendant souffrir m’estuet grief payne' – hence I assume the Old French spelling of 'atendant'. The 14-minute piece was a spacious, tremulous delight, consistently piano with lots of silences – more of a summer piece maybe, given the struggles of the coughers in the audience to keep quiet. Adam de la Cour’s Con-join was an example of theatre of the absurd, a 'bondage' piece with the duo’s inside wrists tied together in fluffy red handcuffs. The struggle, initially a matter of synchronising when to play, became more like a staged sword fight. "The first movement is a homage to Chico Marx, the second a romantic arrangement of Mexican wrestling movie soundtracks", the composer writes – soundtracks of course very familiar to readers of International Piano.

Michael Finnissy’s Third Symphonic Etude was a deconstruction of virtuosity from Beethoven to Schumann via Czerny. Its twisting, distorting temporal effects, between and within the two piano parts – especially in the warping, deranged Romanticism of the slow section – were totally compelling. There were also two solo pieces. Frederik Croene performed Enno Poppe’s wonderfully titled seven-minute Theme with 840 Variations. (I counted only 839. Only joking.) Ian Pace performed Marco Stroppa’s Ninnananna and Moai from Miniature Estrose, tremulous too but with a much wider dynamic range, with books placed under the pedals, I assume to restrict their dynamic range." – Andy Hammilton