Ravinia 2023 Issue 1

Lawn Clippings Counting by Tens I WAS DELIGHTED TO SEE that on June , celebrated cabaret pianist and vo- calist Michael Feinstein will be joined in the Martin eatre by acclaimed pianist Jean-Yves ibaudet for a program that includes long-lost Gershwin composi- tions arranged for two pianos. How delighted? To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, let me count the ngers. My parents were undoubtedly thinking a little about their own sanity when they chose piano as the instrument for me and my sister to study. Perhaps its biggest asset is being capable of producing both melody and accompaniment—or even, if you want to get highfalutin, multiple melodies called counterpoint. Al- though it is rarely called for, a single pianist can produce up to notes at once, unlike a violin, piccolo, or trumpet. Of course, the possibilities double when you combine two musicians: four hands, twenty ngers! Music listeners of a certain age will no doubt remember Ferrante and Teicher, two Juilliard-schooled pianists who, between and , produced lavish easy-listening arrangements of show tunes and movie music, culminating with their mega-hit version of the theme from the lm Exodus . My own rst experience as half of a two-piano team was not quite as felici- tous. At the age of , I was to close my music school’s annual recital with a rendi- tion of a Concerto in C by Howard Kasschau, accompanied on the second piano by my older sister. She began the imposing introduction, a er which I entered and, a er about measures, su ered a memory lapse. If you’re playing alone, there’s a chance, however slim, of covering up or faking it until you can get going again, but not when you’re playing with another musician. A er a second false start, we eventually got through the thing, but by then the trauma was complete. Henceforth I knew with certainty that I was not destined to be a concert artist. I did, however, follow illustrious historical precedent by performing with my sister. Since duo-keyboard teams require such sympathetic musical intuition, it has not been unusual to nd siblings together onstage. Most famous, perhaps, was the pairing of Mozart and his older sister Maria Anna (“Nannerl”), who were dragged in tandem by their father throughout Europe to dazzle the crowned heads. In our own time, other pairs of siblings have made names for themselves as four-armed music machines, including twin brothers Richard and John Con- tiguglia, and the sister acts of Katia and Marielle Labèque, Georgia and Louise Mangos, and Christina and Michelle Naughton. But deep musical connections can also be forged by spouses. Ravinia audi- ences have frequently applauded the husband-and-wife team of Misha and Cipa Dichter, and my own college harpsichord teacher had studied in her youth with the only full-time harpsichord duo in America, the Chicago-based team of Philip Manuel and Gavin Williamson (who opened the Ravinia season of ). ey met while attending the University of Chicago in and, until Philip’s death in , lived together as what we today would call husbands, but which a Time magazine pro le euphemistically termed “inseparable bachelors.” Yes, two-keyboard music pre-dates the piano: J.S. Bach le us three concer- tos for two harpsichords, two concertos for three harpsichords, and even one concerto for four harpsichords—that’s forty ngers! But that count was surpassed in more recent times by another group of siblings, e Browns. In their recitals, which have included several at Ravinia, they don’t always all perform at once; but in they commissioned Nico Muhly to compose Edge of the World , a con- certo for ve pianos that they premiered at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under then-Ravinia Music Director James Conlon. Half-a-hundred digits may sound like an impressive musical force, but imag- ine multiplying that by a hundred! at’s what none other than famed children’s author Dr. Seuss did when he wrote his only Hollywood feature lm, e , Fingers of Dr. T . Most of the lm is an expressionist nightmare in the feverish mind of a young boy who hates piano lessons and his tyrannical piano teach- er, Dr. Terwilliker. e lm’s climax is a concert performed upon a monstrous, quintessentially Seussian double keyboard that snakes around a room the size of a basketball court and is played by an army of hapless boys. But at the start of the lm, when the protagonist pupil protests that he doesn’t think the piano is his instrument, Dr. T. erupts: “What other instruments are there, pray tell? Scratchy violins? Screechy piccolos? Nauseating trumpets?” I have to wonder if my parents hadn’t seen that lm before buying our family’s piano. John Schauer is a freelance writer and amateur keyboardist who can be seen using the printed score in his Revival Harpsichord videos on YouTube. 7Ke fiQDO VeTXeQce of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T ZKeUeLQ WKe WLWXODU WDVNPDVWeU SUeSDUeV Wo OeDG D YeULWDEOe ȇoUcKeVWUDȈ of \oXQJ SLDQo VWXGeQWV VQDNLQJ DUoXQG KLV VSecWDcXODUO\ XQLTXe SeUfoUPDQce KDOO RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JUNE 6 – JULY 2, 2023