The afternoon in Paris in 1912, when Igor Stravinsky showed the just finished score of The Rite of Spring to Claude Debussy, must be top of many people’s wish-I’d been-a-fly-on-the-wall moments. Together the two composers played through a piano-duet arrangement that Stravinsky had made, with Debussy apparently sight-reading his part faultlessly. Perhaps it’s because of that encounter between two of the 20th-century’s greatest composers that nowadays the Rite is heard performed in that piano version far more often than similar arrangements of other celebrated orchestral scores.
It was the piece that Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin first recorded as a duo 14 years ago, and it formed the second half of their latest venture together at the Wigmore Hall. The Rite suits both pianists’ faultless techniques and uncompromising brilliance perfectly, and the savage intensity of their immaculately coordinated performance (playing the piano-duet version on two pianos) was overwhelming, just a bit short on some of the colours and details that are such an indelible part of orchestral performances.
But those same qualities had been rather less suited to some of the music in the first half of their recital. They were just right for Hallelujah Junction, John Adams’s 1996 backward glance towards the early, more austere days of American minimalism, but the account of Debussy’s arrangement of Schumann’s six Studies in Canonic Form, originally composed for a pedal piano, seemed more severe, less intimate than it can be. And while Debussy’s own masterpiece En Blanc et Noir certainly had the sweep and verve it needs, there was sometimes a lack of real inwardness, so that the battlefield bugle calls of the memorial central movement seemed only prosaic. But a fine recital nevertheless.
