A duo in life and music

BASYA LAYE

Local classical music audiences will be treated to a rare pleasure when the Silver-Garburg Piano Duo performs their Vancouver debut, presented by the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver later this month.

Playing as a duo for more than a decade, the Berlin-based Sivan Silver and Gil Garburg are, in fact, a couple on and off the piano bench. Married, with a young son, Silver and Garburg have built a successful performance career, playing at venues on five continents, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre in New York City, the Philharmonie and Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Gewandhaus Leipzig and the Sydney Opera House. Aside from their busy touring schedule, the pair has taught master classes in Moscow, Helsinki, Beijing and Israel and are the 2011 artists in residence at the Australian National Academy of Music.

Silver and Garburg were born in Israel of Israeli parents and, in Garburg’s case, Israeli grandparents. Their musical interest began young – in Silver’s case, it was almost from birth. “Sivan was always considered as a ‘wunderkind’ and played a public concert on the radio already at the age of three,” said Garburg in an e-mail interview with the Independent. “[I] always had a passion for music but [my] decision to become a pianist came much later,” in his late teens, he added.

“We first met at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts, which is the best, and [was] then the only music school in Israel,” said Garburg. “We even competed against each other in the final year for the school orchestra competition (we shared the prize) and then went on to study with the same teacher at the academy.”

That teacher was Arie Vardi at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University, a major influence on both pianists. “We both studied with Vardi, first at the Tel Aviv University and then [at the] Hochschule für Musik in Hanover. What makes Arie a wonderful teacher is his ability to give every student a different lesson according to the student needs. [Sivan and I] are very different in our personalities [and] we can say that we have given each other many, many lessons and still do almost every rehearsal we play. Naturally, every great concert by a true musician is a lesson, in such that it can show us a new way or idea of treating the musical material. Although we don’t need lessons [anymore], we will be working from January with Alfred Brendel,” an experience to which both pianists are looking forward.

While Silver and Garburg’s performances draw primarily from a 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century classical repertoire, the pianists have also collaborated with contemporary composers, performing many new compositions. According to Garburg, they experience a sense of intimacy with the music, whether the composer is alive or long-deceased.

“We feel very intimate with Schumann, Rachmaninov or Stravinsky when we play them. So, in that sense, it doesn’t matter,” he said. Still, working with a living composer is “a wonderful process of being able to make … possible – and hopefully inspire – the creation of new works,” Garburg added. “We just performed, in Dresden, a première of a piece for two pianos, eight hands,” a form of playing, he explained, that has “too little original repertoire.”

The critics have been enthusiastic, calling the couple “brilliant,” “compelling” and “magnificent,” and have routinely remarked upon the duo’s lyrical and emotional sensitivity and their ability to work together at the piano bench. One reviewer wrote, “The four hands seemed to belong to a single body, so accurate and precise was the coordination between the two players,” a sentiment that seems to find wide agreement in the classical music community. That kind of intensity can be challenging, even for those duos that do not live and parent together in addition to their musical duties.

“One of the great things about piano playing is that a good pianist can make the piano sing. It is actually an illusion, as the piano cannot actually ‘continue’ the sound. This illusion is created by the balance, touch and timing,” Garburg explained. “These elements are especially difficult to achieve in four-hands playing, as it requires a total assimilation between the players, unlike a piano trio, where each player has a much more distinct part. This is the beauty of playing in our ensemble. But, in the process of learning, it can also be difficult. In our playing, we try to get the exactly same feeling of the phrase and beat and harmonic color. Although it sounds trivial, even a very small difference can stop us from reaching the kind of music we want to achieve.”

At home in Berlin, the pianists enjoy an almost exclusively classical environment, one which has already inspired their 15-month-old son, who “loves to listen and dance to the music and to play, said Garburg. “We play and listen almost only to classical music. We also listen, very seldom, to jazz, but to nothing else. We even don’t have a TV, partly because we find the background music disturbing.”

The couple’s Vancouver audience can expect an exciting line up on Nov. 14 at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre. “The program we will play in Vancouver is made from three wonderful works: Robert Schumann’s the Etudes in Canon Form, op. 56. These are six beautiful, romantic, character pieces, each very different and still they are all in canon form (which is the repeat of the same melody in two or more melodies). It gives them a wonderful neo-Baroque character while still retaining Schumann’s beauty of the music.

“The original version of Petrushka by [Igor] Stravinsky for piano, four hands, was written in the same two weeks he [wrote] the orchestral version. Stravinsky composed on the piano and, though he was also one of the great orchestrators of the 20th century, his piano writing is wonderful. One can compare the two versions to a color version (for the orchestra) and a photo in black and white. It simply has completely different qualities.”

The third piece in the program is Maurice Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole, thought to be an homage to the composer’s Basque mother, written in 1907-1908. This piece is considered to be a “colorful,” “sensuous” and “atmospheric” work.

It’s the audience that allows the impact to be fully realized, however. “For us,” said Garburg, “the audience is an important [part] of the concert. The listening of the audience creates the time frame in which music is being made. It is a magical moment when all the audience stands with you for the change of color in harmony. Naturally, different audiences can be different in different places.”

And, most important for a great performance, the duo has a lot of fun at the piano. “We enjoy ourselves very much,” Garbug said. “In fact, we seem to enjoy playing more and more with the years. The same is also [true] for pieces. The more experienced the piece, the more we can enjoy it and be free with it in concert. It doesn’t matter that we already played it in 100 other concerts, we ‘create’ and breathe the music as we play it.”

To hear selections from the Silver-Garburg Piano Duo repertoire, visit silvergarburg.com. To purchase tickets, visit ticketstonight.ca or call 604-684-2787.

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