The piano partnership of Peter Hill and Benjamin Frith is a formidable one. The recordings are authoritative and the impact of their live performance is extraordinary. This was a dazzling display of both technical and intellectual brilliance.
Hill and Frith brought a fresh and acute focus to the early and comparatively little-known Six Pieces for four hands by Rachmaninov. The sequence occasionally suggested a debt to Schubert's duets but in the more elaborate textures there was a typically Rachmaninov pianism, as well as hints of the composer's precocious familiarity with the great symphonic repertoire in piano duet reduction. There were also frequent pointers to later thematic preoccupations: in the Thème Russe the resonance of church bells giving way to a lilting lament worthy of a Tchaikovsky slow movement, and in the final piece, Slava, blazing fanfares reminiscent of Mussorgsky's Great Gate of Kiev.
The Six Pieces contrasted sharply with the abrasive and neurotic tensions of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, the original finale of his String Quartet Op 130. This arrangement - also for four hands on one piano - was made by Beethoven himself, with further reassigning of lines and notes by the performers themselves to avoid brachial "gridlock", as Hill put it. Not even the extreme clarity of their articulation could alter the unremitting quality of this music on the keyboard, yet in its discord came an uncanny sense of Beethoven forcibly breaking the bounds of convention and taking a giant leap towards the 20th century.
The evening's high point was Messiaen's ecstatic cycle for two pianos, Visions de l'Amen. The playing was so vivid that the air seemed to fill with the sweet smell of incense and the joyful clamour of birdsong and exotic gongs. There was a tenderness and sensuality in the lyrical phrases but, in the hands of Hill and Frith, it was the florid rhythmic exuberance and cumulative force of Messiaen's impassioned testimonies to divine power that made this so compelling. Audience and performers alike seemed stunned but elated by the experience.
