Ax and Bronfman: Four Hands Playing as One

Chamber music is often thought of as the most serious, high-church form of classical music. So it's hard to say why hearing two virtuosos play together should be so much fun. But on Sunday at George Mason University, the joint recital of Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman was basically all about entertainment -- in the best sense.

It lies partly with the music. The repertory for duo piano has a participatory element. Certainly both Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Haydn and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances were conceived as concert works -- both were written by the composers at approximately the same time they wrote the better-known orchestral versions of these pieces. But the pace-setter for Sunday's concert, as far as approach went, was Mozart's antic K. 448 Sonata for Two Pianos: something the composer wrote for one of his piano students. Like so much four-handed repertory, it was made to be played among friends, not necessarily in a concert space, and to be played together, at a time when piano music was more to be made than to be listened to.

There is, in short, a sense of dialogue and conversation that is absent from the paradigm of the solo piano recital, freighted with intensity and significance. And Ax and Bronfman are artists who thrive on communication. Both of them are known for playing well with others, participating in innumerable collaborations and chamber music events. They also have a personal connection, not only as colleagues on the international scene but as neighbors in the same Upper West Side apartment building.

So what one saw Sunday was a conversation between friends, now earnest, now lighthearted, carried on with constant physical cues, little twitches of the head or mouthed "one, twos" at the start of each piece, augmenting the train of musical thought. They had plenty to say. Ax's playing is clear and straightforward; Bronfman's is thick, warm and supple; and each picked up the other's ideas and chewed them over, blending the sound in the long bodies of their pianos or exploding in rattling chains of notes at the end of the Brahms.

The showpiece of the program, certainly, was the Symphonic Dances, which drew a veritably orchestral range of timbres out of the instruments, playing music that has a slightly sour, slightly wistful tinge, backward-looking to an earlier, emphatically bygone past (it was written in 1940), not unlike Ravel's "La Valse."

But the highlight was William Bolcom's "Recuerdos," a set of three dances in Bolcom's best idiom, which is to say a vernacular one. Bolcom has written plenty of big pieces, but it's with his smaller works that he tends to hit it out of the park. These delightful little Latin-themed pieces, brilliantined and slightly ironic, played to the pianists' own sense of humor. Their Mozart was clean, their Brahms rich, but their Bolcom was simply delightful and set a mood that was picked up in the four-hand encore, Dvorak's Symphonic Dance in A-flat, which they played at a single keyboard. For this, they abandoned all pretense of seriousness and resorted to broad gestures of slapstick.