Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live!

 Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 27

Always much looked-forward to on the Portsmouth Lunchtime Live schedule is the visit of the Ivory Duo, Natalie Tsaldarakis and Panayotis Archontides. On this occasion their programme readily divided itself into two halves, the first of great delicacy and the second more powerful.

Lola Perrin's Lettres d'amour dans le parc was a homage to Debussy, lingering faraway, possibly in the subconscious as if on the outer limits of our awareness. Then, with Ravel's anniversary making his music a more popular choice than ever, Ma mère l'Oye was a suite of miniatures based on nursery rhymes, its opening Pavane from Sleeping Beauty retaining much from the first piece. Panayotis brought forth the beast in the bass in Conversation of the Beauty and The Beast until Le jardin féerique, the Fairy Garden, was gentlest of all until a sparkling finish.

I'm not sure I'm aware of a composer quite like Busoni whose ravishing Romanticism fits so well with his sympathy for Bach. His Finnländische Volksweisen fuses vigorous folk melodies with a sense of baroque order, its highly-charged reverberations not restrained but enhanced by its respect for, and echoes of, the godfather of counterpoint. It developed into a vivacious vivace and a precocious presto.But more vigour was yet to come as Panayotis rattled through the top end of Danse Macabre in a tempestuous account with Natalie in the engine room. She didn't have quite so much time for it in this but elsewhere when she had a spare hand she helped herself to a bit of conducting practice and I wondered if she has in mind a further career on a podium. 

For the most part my family were cyclists more than musicians. My father rode on the front of a tandem, firstly with his brother behind as a teenager and later in life with my mother. The tandem was jocularly known in such circumstances as the 'marriage tester'. Such partners performing together on the one piano is an obvious parallel. In both cases, the test has been passed - most harmoniously.