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ZOFO brings together stunning piano duets by four noted 20th century composers and pianists who knew each other, learned from each other, and sometimes shared the bench. Stravinsky played his piano–four–hand score of his Rite of Spring with Debussy in Paris, before any orchestra had touched the work. Debussy’s sensual 1901 Six Epigraphes Antiques, inspired by Sappho’s poetry, boasts daring harmonics that influenced much music to come in the next hundred years, not least that of Stravinsky himself. Bernstein’s Candide Overture, opens the program in a flash of American exuberance. As young students at Harvard, Bernstein and Harold Shapero teamed up as a piano duo, and Shapero wrote his 1941 Sonata for the two of them.
