Manchester's International Piano festival was first launched in 2000, the brainchild of its director Kathryn Stott. Focusing on performers rather than composers is a good way to bring new music into the public domain, as well as to challenge a performing practice that still gravitates towards convention rather than exploration. Who would have known that Max Bruch wrote a double piano concerto?
When an American piano duo commissioned Bruch to compose a Double Concerto, he simply revised an earlier, unpublished Organ Suite in record time. What makes this history so intriguing is that the piece is shamelessly idiomatic, verging on the cynical. It sounds every inch the commission rather than the inspired creation of an independent composer. But if this is especially true of the bombastic finale, it is less so of the first movement, which opens with an austere fugue that is pure Bach. Nelson Goerner and Rusudan Alavidze, a husband-and-wife team, were brilliantly matched. If the Bruch Concerto was the work that most exploited the rich sonorities of two pianos, Mozart's E flat Double Concerto was the one that drew the most intimate, communicative playing, here from Paul Lewis and Imogen Cooper. Their beautifully crafted dialogue in the slow movement was one of the concert's highlights.
Graham Fitkin's Circuit, for two pianos and orchestra, here receiving its world premiere from Kathryn Stott and Noriko Ogawa, is a characteristically extrovert exploration of the piano's percussive potential. There is a distinctly French voice in the midst of those motoric textures, especially in the way Fitkin builds tension through repetition and sustained harmonies as well as in some exotic turns of phrase in the slower middle section. Poulenc's Double Concerto came as a timely reminder, then, that French composers were at the forefront of 20th-century piano writing. Few could have conveyed Poulenc's Gallic blend of elegance, humour and tenderness more gracefully than Jean-Philippe Collard and Pascal Rogé. Vassily Sinaisky and the BBC Philharmonic were dedicated partners throughout.
