Pianos, like dogs, are best kept apart: the sound of more than one together in a small space can be torture. And it was in a relatively small space at Clare Hall, Cambridge that I heard a two-piano recital to mark the college’s 50th year of existence.
Marie-Noëlle Kendall and Patrick Hemmerlé were both strong, percussive players with a muscular intensity that thundered through Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Ravel’s La Valse (in the composers’ own keyboard transcriptions). Earplugs would have been a mercy.
