Two Pianos, Two Debuts

When the Yukawa-Chan Duo face each other across two Steinway grand pianos for their New York City debut tomorrow at Weill Recital Hall, it will be the latest high point in a distinctly energetic journey. Their performance at London’s Southbank Centre in January 2005 led to appearances at Royal Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall, and during last year’s London Film Festival, director Mike Figgis (“Leaving Las Vegas”) projected the duo in action on a 120-foot screen in Trafalgar Square. Their repertoire ranges from Mozart’s Concerto No. 10 for Two Pianos in E flat to works of the composer Louis Andriessen, and their stateside debut at the Music Festival of the Hamptons in 2006 garnered them the Tiffany & Co. Rising Star award.The duo’s telepathic rapport is unmistakable as they play, but although Rosey Chan, 28, and Cassie Yukawa, 26, have known of each other for most of their lives, it took years before they played together. “From the age of 7 or 8,” Ms. Chan said in an interview with The New York Sun, “we were in the same competitions in the Surrey area outside London. We never actually spoke for many years, but we were always on one another’s radar.” Having vied for top prizes through childhood, the two pianists attended the Royal College of Music. “We had the same professor,” Ms. Chan said, “who’d say: ‘It’s funny how you interpret Bach and shape that particular phrase — Cassie does the same thing.'”“What he was picking up on,” Ms. Yukawa said, “was extremely specific to the way we play. And after many years of observing each other, there was this space around us that obviously provided great motivation.”After graduation, Ms. Chan was approached to play a London concert and decided to bridge the divide. “It was going to be an hour-and-a-half concert in a Georgian mansion in Mayfair,” she said, “and it took me about three weeks to get the courage to text Cassie and ask if she was interested in a one-off paid gig.” Ms. Yukawa was en route to Japan, engaging extra-musical interests in film and photography, but the inquiry held too much intrigue. “If it had come from anyone else,” she said, “I would have pursued that other path. Because it came from Rosey, I felt I had to find out what the motivation was.” After meeting to decide on material, they practiced separately for weeks, then met to rehearse and immediately experienced the fusion of fluent technique and vigorous enthusiasm that’s become the duo’s trademark.“We had no expectations,” Ms. Chan said, “but from that first rehearsal, it’s opened up so many doors.” When she was 11, she’d attended a recital by Katia and Maribelle Labèque, and she now finds “that playing in a duo is far more challenging than playing as a soloist. You have to concentrate a hell of a lot more: on synchronicity, on phrasing, elements on which you have to really get together. When it comes to performance, it’s all about taking risks, spontaneity, challenging each other, dueling.”“It’s a continually engaging experience for us,” Ms. Yukawa said, adding that as the duo memorizes more than 90% of their material, people find “it’s like two people speaking.” After warm-up scales on the rehearsal pianos spooned together in the basement of Steinway Hall on 57th street, the duo fixed gazes, then struck the startling chord that opens “Binary,” by Victoria Bond, which will receive its world premiere at their Weill debut. Etching its fervent runs with exquisite detail, they then heightened the drama with Ms. Yukawa’s low accompaniment to Ms. Chan’s charged theme, a passage matched with alluring body language: the marksman’s intensity of Ms. Chan’s eyes, the supple posture Ms. Yukawa took over the Steinway’s keys. Immensely resonant unisons decayed into the limber, rollicking closing passage, as well as the duo’s peals of laughter.Their bill at Weill features works by Debussy, Rachmaninoff, William Bolcom, and David Lang of Bang on a Can, and they plan collaborations with DJ Spooky that address spatial relations with the audience. “When we’re thinking about how to play the music,” Ms. Yukawa said, “it’s so much about the meaning: What is this music trying to convey? When we have the direct presence of the composer, you have the most direct way of trying to invest what they mean.” Since participating in the Royal Festival Hall’s experimental event, “Ether,” in 2006, where they played an improvisational piece by Michael Nyman (who scored Jane Campion’s film, “The Piano”), they’ve been working with Mr. Nyman on material for their debut disc, to be released this fall on Naxos.Tomorrow, 8 p.m. (154 W. 57th St., 212-247-7800).

Two Pianos, Two Debuts

Two Pianos, Two Debuts

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