Opinion: Two Pianists Playing As A Team

The art of the duo piano team is above all the art of cooperation. Technical mastery and mature musicianship will make a successful soloist. But to these qualities in the case of duo pianists must be added a sensitivity to each other's playing so fine that if listeners close their eyes they will think they're hearing one person.

On Saturday evening at the Fine Arts Theater of Southampton College, a large audience had the pleasure of hearing such playing from the young team of George Petrou and Christos Papageorgiou. An occasional nod seemed the only visual communication necessary between them. The rest was in their hands.

Fresh from an invitational performance in Chicago at UNICEF's 50th anniversary gala, Mr. Petrou and Mr. Papageorgiou played this second concert on their first U.S. tour to celebrate Southampton Town's approval of new architectural plans for the Greek Orthodox Church there. Their concert proved a celebration of music as well.

Folk Tunes

They opened with "Eight Dances From the Greek Islands" by Yiannis Constandinithis. Virtually unknown in this country, Constandinithis studied in Berlin before returning to his native Greece to pursue a career in writing both serious and popular music. Writing popular works under the reversed name of Constantin Yiannis, he died in 1970.

For this listener his "Dances" were the discovery of the evening. Eight folk tunes arranged in a general sequence of slow-fast-slow with considerable contrapuntal and rhythmic complexity revealed a lively and sophisticated talent bearing favorable comparison to that of composers like Bela Bartok and Benjamin Britten when they also set folk tunes.

Lightly influenced by the French Impressionists, the writing combined mastery of composition for two pianos with a robust and affectionate rendering of Greek atmosphere and culture. The wine-dark Aegean Sea as well as the kind of sky so expansive that Henry Miller once said it made him want to bathe in it were present in the music, as was the exuberant stamping of feet in taverna dances.

Mr. Petrou and Mr. Papageorgiou played it all as if the winning of Greek independence depended on their performance.

Notes Of Passion

Rachmaninoff's "Suite for Two Pianos" ("Fantaisies Tableaux") followed. A somewhat colorless playing of the opening barcarole led to more sensitive exposition of the next two sections, "La Nuit . . . L'Amour" and "Larmes" ("Tears"). The love here was passionate and the tears, embodied in a four-note descending line on which the whole movement is built, went from mild sniffling to wild weeping.

In "Paques" ("Easter") the suite ended with a grand finale of ringing Russian church bells. Written when Rachmaninoff was only 20, this Opus 5 is already technically virtuostic.

If its emotionalism is sometimes youthfully excessive, strong intimations can also be heard of the mature passions gloriously expressed but imperiously controlled that make his later piano concertos such masterpieces.

Fiend Done Justice

After the intermission, Mr. Petrou and Mr. Papageorgiou switched pianos and launched into the Polish composer Alexandre Tansman's "Fantaisie on the Waltzes of Johann Strauss." This proved the least distinguished composition of the evening. An interweaving of snatches from six Strauss waltzes, the music was certainly pleasing and clever but ventured no farther.

The evening ended with a bang-up performance of Franz Liszt's "Reminiscences of 'Don Juan.' " Based on themes from Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni," "Reminiscences" filters Mozart's dramatic classicism through Liszt's extravagant romanticism.

No one can summon such splendid noise from a piano as Liszt, and here, with two at his disposal, he outdoes himself. Mr. Petrou and Mr. Papageorgiou did virtuostic justice to each fiendish note and impassioned glissando Liszt uses to express both his homage to a great predecessor and his own interpretation of - and perhaps identification with - the Don's notorious activities.

Already winners of many international competitions, George Petrou and Christos Papageorgiou should meet with much success on their debut U.S. tour. Judging by the reactions of Saturday's audience, they would always be welcome on the East End.