Peter Donohoe and Martin Roscoe at the Sheldonian Theatre

Music for Two Pianos: Brahms, Rachmaninov and Gershwin

Peter Donohoe and Martin Roscoe are ridiculously talented pianists who, whilst pursuing highly-successful solo careers, continue to perform and record duets together. But their duet is a very different beast to the cosy two-children-on-one-seat-playing-arrangements-of-Strauss-waltzes variety. Donohoe and Roscoe play separate pianos, allowing each player full range of the keyboard, and, doubling a single keyboard's possibilities, producing a phenomenal complexity and depth of sound that was especially seized upon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The programme began with two works embedded in the late nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of vast sumptuous chords and heart-wrenching melodies: Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and Rachmaninov's Suite No. 2. True to the Theme and Variation genre, Brahms's work states an original theme - here, from Haydn's Partita for wind instruments - followed by a variations that develop its chordal and contrapuntal possibilities. With two pianos, there's the danger of drowning out the subtler voices in the vast proliferation of surrounding sound, but Donohoe and Roscoe's musical interaction is so finely developed and balanced that the listener could be fooled into thinking they were listening to a single - albeit very good - pianist. Rachmaninov's Suite was composed at the same time as his second piano concerto, and the relationship between the two works is instantly recognisable. The Suite is a more energetic work than the Concerto, richly syncopated and polyphonic, but lacking the breathing space provided by the Concerto's exquisitely simple second movement: one is left feeling rather exhausted and, well, beaten-up by its end.

The second half of the programme traces the piano duet's transition into the next century, tackling Grainger's Fantasy on 'Porgy and Bess' and an arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Now, Rhapsody in Blue is ultimate martini music, but its slickness is too often transformed into mushiness, its languid beginning over-extended into lethargy. Donohoe and Roscoe, though, inject insistent vitality from the very start, in a furiously resonant bass and an overwhelmingly physical interpretation that made me want to stomp my feet. OK, in places the pedalling was not as crisp as I would have liked, the pauses were hurried over, and the pianists not equally matched in terms of volume, but this was Rhapsody in Blue as it should be - martini music that's not hungover.

And the encore was a revelation. Bringing the piano duet genre into the later twentieth century, and bringing the programme full-circle with a return to the Variation and Theme structure, Donohoe and Roscoe dismissed any niggling suspicions that their programme was, well, a bit of crowd-pleaser, and offered Lutoslawski's Variations on a Theme by Paganini. An jubilant anarchic uplifting vital piece of syncopation and variation gone mad, Donohoe and Roscoe were clearly really having fun and, judging by the equally jubilant applause, so were their audience.

Rachel Hewitt 12-05-01