Friday, December 7, 5pm; Sunday, December 9, 4pm
St Paul´s Church, Cardo 6
$150, $300. $400

Four Hands Piano

Get ready for two of the most unique concerts of the 2018-2019 concert season! Four-hands piano concerts featuring acclaimed artist Julie Coucheron, called “exquisite” by the Washington Post, and San Miguel favorite William Ransom, described as a "technical dazzler, and more" by the Detroit Free Press, will inspire listeners through this unusual and challenging form. Don’t miss these one-of-a-kind concerts on Friday, December 7, at 5 pm, and Sunday December 9, at 4 pm at St. Paul’s Church on Calle Cardo.

Four-hand piano music has a long-standing tradition of bringing orchestral music to people who might not otherwise hear it for financial or geographic reasons, and as large scale concert going becomes ever more expensive and remote for most people, this art for has enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity. Though many four-hand piano works are transcribed, the form also includes many original works, and at these two recitals we will hear the finest examples of both.

On Friday, the audience will enjoy Beethoven’s Sonata in D Major, a product of his late twenties, and a testament to the composer's striving with an almighty passion to make his music accessible, whilst at the same time breaking the mold of traditional compositional forms. Barber’s Souvenirs, written in 1951, hearkens back to the golden days of his childhood and his nostalgia for the beautiful moments he experienced on an outing with his mother to the idyllic countryside. Brahms’ Five Hungarian Dances was inspired by two of his close friends, Eduard Remény and Joseph Joachim, both violinists. The melodies are influenced by Roma folk music which the Maestro adapted to fit his own idioms. The highlight of the program will be a dramatic piano transcription of Beethoven’s incomparable Symphony No. 5.

On Sunday, listeners will delight in Mozart’s Sonata in F Major, a true masterpiece of delicacy and nuanced phrasing. The composer often wrote four-hand piano music with his brilliant sister Nannerl, but he stopped after she died, and returned to the form later in life, leaving us this elegant gem. The strangely unique P.D.Q. Bach’s Sonata Innamorata is meant to seduce and comes from a foray into satirical humor. Transcribed by Peter Schickele, a Julliard graduate, the piece has very curious and playful ideas about instrumentation, which will delight and amuse you. Debussy’s Petite Suite conjures up nostalgia for the “good old days” of France’s golden past, but with the added twist of the composer's 'free form' compositional style . The set piece of the concert will be Saint-Saëns’ joyful Carnival of the Animals, a circus-like romp through a menagerie of musical animals which always delights audiences from 5 to 105 years old!

Tickets for the concerts at St. Paul’s are $150, $300 and $400 pesos donation each, and are on sale at La Tienda in the Biblioteca Pública, Solution on Recreo 11, through our website with no booking fee, and at the concert 45 minutes before performance time. Details of all Pro Musica’s concerts and Patron Membership are on our web site, www.promusicasma.org, or contact us at promusicasma@aol.com.