Lucas & Arthur Jussen launch album of underperformed compositions : NPR

They end one another sentences, in dialog and in music.

Brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen have performed music collectively way back to they will keep in mind. They carried out for the Dutch queen as younger boys. As a piano duo, they’ve taken that symbiotic connection to among the world’s best live performance halls.

“The unusual factor is that with Arthur, I by no means discover when our palms contact or our heads or no matter, it is only a very pure factor,” Lucas instructed NPR’s A Martínez. “I might by no means think about doing that with another person or or not doing that with Arthur.”

This month, they’re releasing recordings of a set of what they name “tiny diamonds” — brief waltzes and lullabies influenced by, and in some circumstances rejecting, French Impressionism from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. There’s Debussy’s “En bateau” (“By Boat”) from his Petite Suite, alongside lesser identified works by Benjamin Godard, Reynaldo Hahn, Charles Koechlin and Germaine Tailleferre.

It is the primary quantity in a trilogy of releases. The second EP, Cantus, is due out in Might and can characteristic works by Bach, Brahms and Estonia’s Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). A ultimate launch in November 2025 will embrace each of Edvard Grieg’s suites of incidental music narrating the story of Norwegian peasant anti-hero Peer Gynt.

The set begins with “Les décrets indolents du hasard” (“Indolent Decrees of Probability”), the primary in a collection of waltzes by Venezuelan-born Hahn referred to as Le ruban dénoué (The Unspooled Ribbon).

Binary and ternary meters alternate between the 2 pianists to evoke the indolence of the title, with an echo-like impact.

Hahn, the one-time lover of French novelist Marcel Proust, primarily composed lyrical music. Even for his piano works, “you must play them additionally as if you’re singing,” mentioned Lucas, 31. That is a serious problem on the piano, which, not like the voice or string devices, cannot maintain a word at size, not to mention indefinitely.

Dutch brothers Lucas, left, and Arthur, proper, Jussen have carried out collectively as a piano duet since they have been younger youngsters.

Jesaja Hizkia/Common Music

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Jesaja Hizkia/Common Music

The fixed switching of leads that takes place right here is central to the Dutch brothers’ broader method to the piano duo repertoire, which they’ve sought to develop by shedding gentle on lesser identified items corresponding to these or by commissioning new works by modern composers, together with concertos by Joey Roukens and Fazil Say.

“I’m fortunate because the youthful brother that I by no means had an older brother who actually wished to be the older brother and wished to be the boss in music in addition to in regular life,” mentioned Arthur, 28. “If you play collectively, I feel an important factor is that there isn’t a ego that wishes to be the largest ego.”

Arthur says he tries to adapt to Lucas “nearly every millisecond.” After they each obtain that degree of synchronicity on the keyboard, “you possibly can can attain a state of enjoying the place you each nearly begin feeling the identical and the blood begins flowing the identical approach,” he added.

Lucas (left) and Arthur Jussen bow with conductor Christoph Eschenbach after performing Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in October 2024.

Todd Rosenberg/Picture offered courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation

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Todd Rosenberg/Picture offered courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Affiliation

Tailleferre was the one lady in Les Six, the avant-garde group of composers shaped greater than a century in the past in Paris. Their musical aesthetic typically rejected German romanticism and the luxurious fashion of Impressionists like Debussy.

Tailleferre’s “Valse lente” (“Gradual Waltz”) has moments of delicate however confounding dissonance, “which makes you are feeling on a regular basis, ‘The place is it going?'” mentioned Lucas. “After which in the long run, it resolves into this type of stunning, dreamy ambiance.”

The Jussens praised the elevated presence of girls composers and conductors in classical music programming, a transition and reckoning that has been sluggish in coming.

“We might be very completely happy and we’d really feel we succeeded if folks after listening to the album will say, ‘OK, that piece proper there, that is my favourite piece, simply because I really like the music a lot,’ and that they won’t say ‘I find it irresistible a lot’ as a result of she is the one lady on the file,” mentioned Lucas.

Koechlin, who taught Tailleferre and Poulenc from Les Six, was a polymath whose pursuits ran the gamut from astronomy, automotive racing and cinema to mountaineering and mythology. Arthur expressed admiration for Koechlin’s many skills. “We will solely play piano — for the remainder, we’re completely ineffective,” he quipped.

Their profession is one which comes with fixed stress and strain to carry out, however the brothers say they remind themselves of what impressed them to play within the first place. “We attempt to all the time keep in mind now 20 years after we began that we prefer it a lot as a result of in case you overlook that and it is nearly enjoying the live shows properly and performing every day, then generally you lose the glint of what music can do and the magic that it has,” Arthur mentioned.

The digital model of this story was produced by Janaya Williams. The digital model was edited by Obed Manuel.