Lucas and Arthur Jussen carry out with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra underneath the baton of Christoph Eschenbach in October 2024.
Todd Rosenberg/Photograph supplied courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation
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Todd Rosenberg/Photograph supplied courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation
They end one another sentences, in dialog and in music.
Brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen have performed music collectively way back to they’ll keep in mind. They carried out for the Dutch queen as younger boys. As a piano duo, they’ve taken that symbiotic connection to a number of the world’s biggest live performance halls.
“The unusual factor is that with Arthur, I by no means discover when our palms contact or our heads or no matter, it is only a very pure factor,” Lucas informed NPR’s A Martínez. “I might by no means think about doing that with another person or or not doing that with Arthur.”
This month, they’re releasing recordings of a set of what they name “tiny diamonds” — brief waltzes and lullabies influenced by, and in some circumstances rejecting, French Impressionism from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. There’s Debussy’s “En bateau” (“By Boat”) from his Petite Suite, alongside lesser recognized works by Benjamin Godard, Reynaldo Hahn, Charles Koechlin and Germaine Tailleferre.
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It is the primary quantity in a trilogy of releases. The second EP, Cantus, is due out in Could and can function works by Bach, Brahms and Estonia’s Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). A closing launch in November 2025 will embody each of Edvard Grieg’s suites of incidental music narrating the story of Norwegian peasant anti-hero Peer Gynt.
The set begins with “Les décrets indolents du hasard” (“Indolent Decrees of Likelihood”), the primary in a collection of waltzes by Venezuelan-born Hahn often called Le ruban dénoué (The Unspooled Ribbon).
Binary and ternary meters alternate between the 2 pianists to evoke the indolence of the title, with an echo-like impact.
Hahn, the one-time lover of French novelist Marcel Proust, primarily composed lyrical music. Even for his piano works, “it’s important to play them additionally as in case you are singing,” stated Lucas, 31. That is a significant problem on the piano, which, not like the voice or string devices, cannot maintain a be aware at size, not to mention indefinitely.
Dutch brothers Lucas, left, and Arthur, proper, Jussen have carried out collectively as a piano duet since they had been younger kids.
Jesaja Hizkia/Common Music
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Jesaja Hizkia/Common Music
The fixed switching of leads that takes place right here is central to the Dutch brothers’ broader strategy to the piano duo repertoire, which they’ve sought to broaden by shedding mild on lesser recognized items corresponding to these or by commissioning new works by up to date composers, together with concertos by Joey Roukens and Fazil Say.
“I’m fortunate because the youthful brother that I by no means had an older brother who actually wished to be the older brother and wished to be the boss in music in addition to in regular life,” stated Arthur, 28. “While you play collectively, I feel an important factor is that there isn’t a ego that wishes to be the most important ego.”
Arthur says he tries to adapt to Lucas “virtually every millisecond.” Once they each obtain that stage of synchronicity on the keyboard, “you possibly can can attain a state of taking part in the place you each virtually begin feeling the identical and the blood begins flowing the identical method,” he added.
Lucas (left) and Arthur Jussen bow with conductor Christoph Eschenbach after performing Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in October 2024.
Todd Rosenberg/Photograph supplied courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation
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Todd Rosenberg/Photograph supplied courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation
Tailleferre was the one lady in Les Six, the avant-garde group of composers fashioned greater than a century in the past in Paris. Their musical aesthetic typically rejected German romanticism and the plush type of Impressionists like Debussy.
Tailleferre’s “Valse lente” (“Gradual Waltz”) has moments of delicate however confounding dissonance, “which makes you’re feeling on a regular basis, ‘The place is it going?'” stated Lucas. “After which in the long run, it resolves into this sort of lovely, dreamy ambiance.”
The Jussens praised the elevated presence of ladies composers and conductors in classical music programming, a transition and reckoning that has been sluggish in coming.
“We might be very joyful and we might really feel we succeeded if individuals after listening to the album will say, ‘OK, that piece proper there, that is my favourite piece, simply because I like the music a lot,’ and that they won’t say ‘I like it a lot’ as a result of she is the one lady on the report,” stated Lucas.
Koechlin, who taught Tailleferre and Poulenc from Les Six, was a polymath whose pursuits ran the gamut from astronomy, automobile racing and cinema to mountaineering and mythology. Arthur expressed admiration for Koechlin’s many skills. “We are able to solely play piano — for the remainder, we’re completely ineffective,” he quipped.
Their profession is one which comes with fixed stress and strain to carry out, however the brothers say they remind themselves of what impressed them to play within the first place. “We attempt to at all times keep in mind now 20 years after we began that we prefer it a lot as a result of for those who neglect that and it is nearly taking part in the concert events effectively and performing every day, then generally you lose the flicker of what music can do and the magic that it has,” Arthur stated.
The digital model of this story was produced by Janaya Williams. The digital model was edited by Obed Manuel.