For their second Steinway & Sons release the Anderson & Roe Piano Duo dedicates their highly calibrated keyboard prowess, clever arranging skills, and canny program building on behalf of Mozart. They open with a lithe and beautifully sculpted reading of Busoni’s Duettino concertante, which is basically the finale of Mozart’s F major K. 459 concerto smothered with texture thickener in the way of added octaves, double notes, and the like. By contrast, the duo’s own treatment of “Soave sia il vento” from Cosi fan tutte exemplifies taste and discretion, with the liberally pedaled accompaniment flowing, as Mozart would have put it, “like oil”.
The pianists seem to have planned out every nuance in Mozart’s D major Sonata for Two Pianos to the point where dynamism and spontaneous repartee take a back seat. While the tapered lines, micromanaged dynamic hairpins, and slight elongations of either phrase ends or downbeats never sound fussy, they do sound prepackaged next to the equally polished yet more poetic interplay that Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu generate. However, the duo gives freer rein to their delightful four-movement Grand Scherzo, especially in their agile and airborne two-piano transformation of Si Mora, Si, Si Mora.
They unleash huge sonorities and dramatic bravura in the Liszt Don Juan Fantasy’s introduction, only to play coy in the Duetto variations with studied ritards and dotted rhythms that are too rigid to dance. Still, one must credit the duo for keeping the Presto Finale’s boisterous momentum alive without resorting to the slightest hint of banging, although I find the live, looser-limbed Martha Argerich/Maurizio Vallina Lugano EMI recording more playful and joyous overall.
Lastly, the duo offers their own arrangement of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca that flirts with ragtime at the start but quickly detours into a madcap Hungarian Rhapsody laced with plenty of pyrotechnical detail à la Cziffra and Horowitz. Here the pianists clearly are having fun, and so is at least one reviewer! Steve Epstein’s engineering counts among the most beautifully balanced and realistically reproduced two-piano releases in the current catalog.
