Interview, Charles Owen & Katya Apekisheva on the art of the piano duo

As some of us no doubt discovered when our usual outlets for making music were on hiatus during the lockdowns of 2020/21, sharing a keyboard with a partner has its own particular pleasures and challenges...Two people who have managed to do this on a regular basis for twenty years without a single cross word are Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva, the co-curators of the London Piano Festival who met as students and have gone on to share piano-benches around the world, both as a duo in their own right and as part of larger ensembles.

Following superb recordings of music by Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, their latest album on Orchid Classics focuses on French repertoire - including Milhaud's Scaramouche suite, two Poulenc sonatas, and Ravel's extraordinary 1910 arrangement of Debussy's Nocturnes for two pianos. I spoke to Charles and Katya last month about their friendship as students, how they make their relationship work, and why music for two pianos or piano-four-hands was so in vogue in France in the first half of the twentieth century...

When and how did your paths first cross?

CO: I think it was in 1987: Katya was twelve and I was fifteen, and a group of students from her school in Moscow came over to perform at the Menuhin School among other places. I’ve never forgotten it – she was amazing! We eventually met in person in 1994 when we were studying with the same teacher at the Royal College of Music, but we didn’t start playing together straight away; we used to see each other at competition-finals or – much more fun! – parties. There are various photos of us out there from big nights in our twenties that could be worth a lot of money one day…!

And at what stage did you start collaborating as a duo?

KA: A friend asked us to play in a festival called The Homecoming which he’d started in Moscow; the idea was that musicians who’d trained at the Gnessin School before studying abroad would come back during the Christmas period and play at the Rachmaninoff Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Charles was invited as a special guest because he speaks Russian very well, and we were asked to play a Shostakovich suite together. Gradually more bookings started coming in for us as a duo, and people started asking for two pianists to play with larger groups as well…We’d never actually set out to create a duo, but it was so great because it just happened naturally!

Playing repertoire for four hands is a particularly intimate musical relationship, given that you're sharing an instrument! What qualities do you both think are most important in this kind of partnership?

KA: You really have to be compatible to play piano duets and music for piano four hands, especially on a regular basis. Obviously you have to click as musicians, in that your aims, ideas and styles need to be similar in some way; in our case I think that worked because we had the same wonderful teacher who was focused on the colour of sound as well as the spoken quality in music. Even though Charles and I have very different styles in some respects, those things are very important for both of us: the ideal is to have two people who can contribute different qualities but still think as one. You’re playing on the same instrument, so there’s no competition in a way!

CO: Your respective sounds have to be compatible, but also slightly different - if you sound identical then a lot of repertoire just doesn’t work. And that also goes for the two pianos that one plays in a recording or concert; if they’re too similar they kind of cancel each other out, like having black-on-black or white-on-white! But perhaps the most important thing is simply the ability to inspire each other, and I know that we do that in every one of our rehearsals.

KA: In all the years we’ve been working together we’ve never had a single fight. And we’re both quite fiery people, so I don’t know how that’s possible!

CO: If we meet up to rehearse and both of us are feeling low on energy, we just do a lot of slow practice together. And that’s so useful in itself in terms of breaking down quite complex scores; it certainly helped us to understand all those layers of polyphony which are present in a lot of the music on the new album.

KA: I don’t think I’ve ever rehearsed with anyone else as much as we do to prepare for a concert; in the run-up to a big event we’ll meet every other day. Fortunately we live very near each other and can get together quite quickly!

CO: We recently performed the complete Rachmaninoff works for two pianos and Eleanor Alberga’s suite in one concert at Kings Place, and even though we knew it all pretty well we started preparing at least three weeks in advance. It’s such a luxury to be able to work like that. We’ve both collaborated with some of the greatest string and woodwind players in the world in different contexts, and when people are flying in from all over the place you’re lucky if you get more than a day to rehearse a full programme!

Where do you tend to rehearse?

CO: We do some work at Katya’s house which has a medium-sized Steinway Model A and an upright piano, but I’m also very fortunate to have two Steinway Model Bs: they’re housed in a lady’s home which is a ten-minute walk from me in North London, and we do most of our rehearsing there.

KA: It’s nice to have a workspace outside of the house – I have an eleven-year-old daughter and things can be a bit hectic at home!

Why do you think was there such a vogue for music for four hands/two pianos in France in the first part of the twentieth century?

CO: Poulenc's interest in the genre was partly to do with his friendship with an American piano duo called Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale; he nicknamed them ‘Les Boys’, and they commissioned a number of his works including the main pieces on our programme.

KA: In France in particular there was a fashion for arranging orchestral pieces for piano four hands: Stravinsky’s Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, and of course the Debussy Nocturnes which we’ve included on the album...

CO: I think there was also a social element at work, because a lot of people played the piano to a high level in France and of course not everyone had gramophones (as they were) in those days. Poulenc was a great improviser, and some of the pieces on the album reflect that. Sitting down to play the piano with friends is the last thing a lot of musicians want to do at a party, but Poulenc absolutely adored it! He used to escape to the Loire Valley quite a lot, where some friends of his owned a home, and a piece like the Élégie on this album was definitely the kind of thing he’d have pulled out there after dinner…

KA: In the printed introduction he specifies that the piece should be played with a cigar in your mouth and brandy on the piano – we haven’t actually tried that yet...!

Piano four hands is a quite sociable genre in general, because it’s less stressful and exposed than playing on your own. And although a lot of the music on this album is very challenging, it’s easy to find repertoire that’s much more accessible to amateurs. My parents are both pianists, and we used to play together a lot when I was growing up: we had transcriptions of string quartets and symphonies by Beethoven and Schubert, all arranged for piano four hands.

Do you each have designated roles as primo or secondo, or do you prefer to mix it up?

KA: We try to be as equal as we can, and switching is good for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes we toss a coin, because we don’t know how to decide! Now and again one of us is allowed to pick a favourite – for instance in the first of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances there’s the most beautiful theme in the first movement that’s taken by the saxophone in the original, and I was absolutely desperate to play that!

CO: But I get the phrase which answers it, which I love! That’s another thing about chamber music: playing the supporting voices (I prefer that to ‘accompanying’!) can be the most wonderful thing if it’s done with real sensitivity and care. Of course the ear is always on the main line, but those inner parts can make or break a string quartet, and it’s exactly the same in two-piano repertoire.

KA: Occasionally you come across pieces for four hands where the bottom line is actually more complex, like Fauré’s Dolly Suite – I remember asking Charles if I could be on the bottom for that, expecting it to be less difficult…how wrong I was!

CO: And that’s deliberate, because Fauré wanted the adult teacher to play the lower, harder part and the child to play the upper – although actually the upper part isn’t all that easy either! It’s interesting when composers do that: we’ve just been playing Stravinsky’s Five Easy Pieces, where again the lower part is much more difficult. In the two-piano repertoire, of course, the balance constantly shifts: both pianists play with the full keyboard, so there’s no sense of somebody being the star and somebody being the servant.

Ravel's transcription of Debussy's Nocturnes was new to me, and it's quite extraordinary! What are the challenges involved in translating a work like that to the piano?

CO: Isn’t it amazing?! I’m getting goose-bumps just sitting here imagining that music…The Nocturnes are among the greatest orchestral pieces of the early twentieth century, and the set was one of Debussy’s first major masterpieces: the music is almost unbelievably imaginative and inspired, and Ravel’s transcription is an incredible homage to this older master. These two giants of French music admired each enormously, but there was occasionally a bit of tension between them from afar… I think it’s the ultimate tribute that Ravel decided to take everything he knew about how the piano worked and give the piece new dimensions. It’s a masterpiece, and I hope this recording will bring more listeners to it.

KA: Ravel’s version isn’t played very often at all; Charles introduced me to it during lockdown, and I think part of the reason it doesn’t get out more is simply because it’s so challenging to bring off. It doesn’t have a narrative in the sense that some of the other pieces do and it isn’t melodically driven, so it’s all about harmonies, colour and atmosphere. In Sirènes in particular, you need to somehow emulate the amazing tonal colours that he creates with the choir…you almost have to forget you’re even playing the piano! It also took us a really long time to achieve that seamless flow of music without bar-lines, and to let go of trying to find where the melody is - because there often isn’t one!

CO: Of course we listened to the orchestral versions just to tap into that sense of atmosphere, but we had to find our own solutions to a lot of things: so often the conductor and players will just float over the bar-lines, where there’s a temptation for pianists to stop (especially when they put down a bass note). Trying to keep those long lines going took a lot of work, but it was worth it!