SCMS presents: Celebrating Pianos, PianoDuo Festival

Smith College Department of Music and Sage Chamber Music Society present Celebrating Pianos! PianoDuo Festival, a two-day festival celebrating the art of twenty fingers, with a concert on Thursday, March 26, at 7:30 PM, pre-concert discussions with the artists at 6:30 PM, and a public masterclass on Friday, March 27, at 11 AM. All events are in Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall, and are free and open to the public.

Originating in the domain of Hausmusik, where connoisseur and amateur pianists played in intimate settings, the genre of piano four-hands and two-piano music has increasingly served as a vehicle for virtuosic displays since the twentieth century. Curated by the Smith College piano faculty, Jiayan Sun, Albert Cano Smit, and Yang Liu, the festival will explore the kaleidoscopic spectrum of the genre, from the most intimate to the most extravagant. In addition to the Cano Smit/Liu Duo from Smith, the Thursday evening concert will feature the award-winning Long Duo, Beatrice Long and Christina Long, who have performed extensively in North America and Asia. The program will include well-known works such as Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre and Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose, and works by Felix Mendelssohn, Claude Debussy, Darius Milhaud, and Dave Brubeck. 

At 6:30 PM, the artists will present a pre-concert talk on the fascinations and challenges of the art of piano duet.

On Friday, March 27, at 11 AM, the Long Duo will give a public masterclass featuring Smith College student pianists playing piano solo and duet works.