Lucas (left) and Arthur Jussen have performed collectively as a piano duo since they had been younger boys.
Stefan Hoederath/Redferns
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Stefan Hoederath/Redferns
They end one another sentences, in dialog and in music.
Brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen, from the Netherlands, have performed music collectively way back to they’ll bear in mind. They carried out for the Dutch queen as younger boys. As a piano duo, they’ve taken that symbiotic connection to a few of the world’s best live performance halls.
“The unusual factor is that with Arthur, I by no means discover when our fingers contact or our heads or no matter, it is only a very pure factor,” Lucas instructed NPR’s A Martínez. “I may 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 identified 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 embrace 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 Probability”), the primary in a collection of waltzes by Venezuelan-born Hahn often known as 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.
Dutch brothers Lucas, left, and Arthur, proper, Jussen have carried out collectively as a piano duet since they had been younger youngsters.
Jesaja Hizkia/Common Music
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Jesaja Hizkia/Common Music
Hahn, the one-time lover of French novelist Marcel Proust, primarily composed lyrical music. Even for his piano works, “it’s a must to play them additionally as if you’re singing,” mentioned Lucas, 31. That is a serious problem on the piano, which, not like the voice or string devices, cannot maintain a notice at size, not to mention indefinitely.
The fixed switching of leads that takes place right here is central to the Dutch brothers’ broader method to the piano duo repertoire, which they’ve sought to develop by shedding gentle on lesser identified items corresponding to these or by commissioning new works by modern 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 needed to be the older brother and needed to be the boss in music in addition to in regular life,” mentioned Arthur, 28. “Once you play collectively, I feel crucial factor is that there isn’t any ego that desires to be the most important ego.”
Arthur says he tries to adapt to Lucas “nearly every millisecond.” Once they each obtain that degree of synchronicity on the keyboard, “you’ll be able to can attain a state of taking part in the place you each nearly begin feeling the identical and the blood begins flowing the identical method,” he added.
Lucas and Arthur Jussen carry out with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra below the baton of Christoph Eschenbach in October 2024
Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation
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Todd Rosenberg/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation
Tailleferre was the one girl 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 refined however confounding dissonance, “which makes you’re feeling on a regular basis, ‘The place is it going?'” mentioned Lucas. “After which in the long run, it resolves into this type of lovely, dreamy environment.”
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’d be very glad and we’d really feel we succeeded if folks after listening to the album will say, ‘OK, that piece proper there, that is my favourite piece, simply because I really like the music a lot,’ and that they won’t say ‘I find it irresistible a lot’ as a result of she is the one girl on the document,” mentioned Lucas.
Koechlin, who taught Tailleferre and Poulenc from Les Six, was a polymath whose pursuits ran the gamut from astronomy, automotive racing and cinema to mountaineering and mythology. Arthur expressed admiration for Koechlin’s many skills. “We are able to solely play piano — for the remaining, we’re completely ineffective,” he quipped.
Their profession is one which comes with fixed stress and stress 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 bear in mind now 20 years after we began that we prefer it a lot as a result of in case you overlook that and it is nearly taking part in the live shows nicely and performing every day, then generally you lose the glint of what music can do and the magic that it has,” Arthur mentioned.
The digital model of this story was produced by Janaya Williams. The digital model was edited by Obed Manuel.
