Porgy & Bess Fantasy: Music for Two Pianos

In the early 1980s two of Australia’s finest pianists joined forces in masterpieces of the piano-duet literature. The set draws on concert and studio sessions from a period when such collaborations were still readily captured.

David Bollard piano
David Stanhope piano
Leslie Howard piano

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composer
Camille Saint-Saëns composer
Percy Grainger composer
George Gershwin composer
Richard Addinsell composer
Sergei Rachmaninoff composer
Claude Debussy composer
Percy Grainger arranger

This double CD is a tribute to that remarkable musical partnership.

The programme ranges widely across two-piano repertoire: Mozart’s Sonata in D major K448 and Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a Theme by Beethoven stand beside works and arrangements by Percy Grainger, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, and Debussy’s En blanc et noir. Grainger’s Fantasy on Porgy and Bess supplies the set’s title.

Artists

David Bollard

David Bollard is a New Zealand-born classical pianist who has made his career in Australia as a performer, teacher and adjudicator. He was a founding member of the Australia Ensemble from 1980 until 1998.

David Stanhope

David Stanhope is an Australian conductor, composer and pianist whose career also takes in horn and bass trombone. He has led opera, ballet, film scores and orchestras across Australia, and is widely known for his wind-band and brass writing.

Tracks

CD 1

Mozart — Sonata in D major K448

Saint-Saëns — Variations on a Theme by Beethoven Op. 35

Grainger — Let’s Dance Gay in Green Meadow
— Hill Song No. 2

Gershwin (Grainger) — Fantasy on Porgy and Bess

CD 2

Addinsell (Grainger) — Warsaw Concerto

Rachmaninoff — Symphonic Dances Op. 45

Debussy — En blanc et noir

Grainger — Green Bushes (six hands, with Leslie Howard)

Performers

David Bollard · piano
David Stanhope · piano
Leslie Howard · piano

Composers

Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was a French composer whose harmony, colour and flexible sense of key reshaped European music at the turn of the twentieth century. Piano, orchestral and chamber works from his maturity remain central to the repertoire.

George Gershwin

George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist whose music spanned popular song, Broadway and the classical concert hall, leaving melodies that remain widely known.

Percy Grainger

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. A brilliant folk-song collector and arranger, he was also a restless experimenter whose work ranged from tuneful percussion to Free Music machines that foreshadowed electronic synthesis.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He wrote over 600 works, many of them pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic and choral music, and remains among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns wrote music of classical clarity and Romantic colour: the Organ Symphony’s blazing finale, the glittering Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, the late Clarinet Sonata, and the song Clair de lune that still draws listeners into moonlight and memory.

Richard Addinsell

Where to listen

Porgy & Bess Fantasy: Music for Two Pianos is available as a CD. It can be purchased online through Buywell Music or the Australian Music Centre which both offer online ordering.