As duo pianists, Pascal Roge and Vanessa Benelli make a striking pair. Roge is an established concert player in his early fifties; Benelli is 15. Both were child prodigies. Roge heard Benelli play in 1999 and was astonished: "She is the most natural musical talent I have encountered in my entire life as a musician and teacher."

Their concert Saturday night in Georgetown for the Dumbarton Concert Series was designed primarily to widen Benelli's musical horizons -- but certainly ours as well. The program included masterpieces languishing in the relatively obscure two-piano repertoire, most particularly Robert Schumann's Six Pieces in canon for pedal piano, Op. 56. These are miracles of lyricism blooming from the granite of austere counterpoint. The performance sang naturally and freely but retained the complex structure that reveals Schumann's debt to Bach.

Rachmaninoff's Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos, Op. 17, has an array of deeply satisfying Big Tunes (melodic fragments that take on febrile power as they emerge from wild tangles of filigree) and murderously difficult technical problems -- jackhammer repeated notes, leaping chords, huge orchestral sonorities, twisted rhythmic schemes. Similarly, the two-piano version of Ravel's "La Valse" is not for the fainthearted, and Poulenc's elegant Sonata for Two Pianos requires souffle-like buoyancy.

Benelli actually seemed to have the upper hand (so to speak) in the Rachmaninoff, as Roge was occasionally late in returning to the fray because of page-turning problems. In musical and technical authority the two pianists seemed evenly matched -- she is clearly a major talent -- though it will take a solo recital to answer that question squarely.

Chopin, Beyond His Piano Forte

By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 10, 2003; Page C05

Frederic Chopin completed his two piano concertos before he reached his 20th birthday. They are famously imperfect creations: If there was little about writing for the piano that Chopin did not understand, he knew next to nothing about writing for anything else. (The late musicologist Herbert Weinstock aptly described the orchestral introduction to the first concerto as "138 measures of piano music poorly distributed among other instruments.")

And yet the mere thought of the inspiration contained within the bounds of these concertos -- of the haunted, windswept melodies that seem to spin out forever, melodies that could have been fashioned by no other composer -- is enough to summon a welling, wistful tenderness from the most pedantic of listeners.

The recent discovery of arrangements of the two concertos for piano and string quintet, arrangements either composed or sanctioned by Chopin himself, sounded too good to be true. Was it possible that these awkward but achingly beautiful pieces might be transformed into fully satisfying chamber music? A capacity audience braved the February cold (and the ubiquitous, and even more chilling, pre-bellum thunder of circling helicopters overhead) to listen to pianist Brian Ganz and the Left Bank String Quartet, augmented for the occasion by the bassist Edgardo Malaga Jr., play the Washington premiere of the hybrids at Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Georgetown on Saturday night.

That such reductions would have been in demand in the mid-19th century is hardly surprising. In an era before radio and recordings, most music was made at home, and, then as now, it was considerably easier to assemble a chamber group than a full orchestra. These transcriptions likely enlivened many a salon.

Still, the central fault of the concertos is present in the chamber arrangements as well. The melodies are wonderful; the formal structures of the movements are baggy but endearing. And yet the accompanimental writing still sounds gray, monolithic, a little plodding. Only the passages for solo cello take on a life of their own; the rest might have been poured from a blender.

Chopin seems to have been incapable of puffing up his thoughts for orchestra or chamber ensemble; rather, it was his great genius to fit a world of expression into the range of a single instrument -- the piano.

None of this is to fault the performances of Ganz and his colleagues, which were lyrical, dynamic, and affectionate throughout. Ganz is an extroverted player, with a generous technique and a bounteous, studiedly bejeweled tone. There were moments when I thought he overdid it: very occasionally, he seemed to be going out of his way to be expressive, without having anything very definite to express. But there could be no denying the energy and elegance of the interpretations.

The program was presented by Dumbarton Concerts, one of several organizations that offer musical events at Dumbarton Church. This is the group's 25th anniversary season.

Red Priest