Pierre Monteux, who conducted the premiere of The Rite of Spring on that catastrophic May evening in 1913, once described hearing Stravinsky pound through the score at the piano for Diaghilev and himself — and said that as the demonstration went on, he became increasingly convinced the composer had lost his mind. The remark is sometimes quoted as a verdict against piano reductions of the work. It isn’t, quite. Monteux was describing the shock of encountering something genuinely new, not delivering an aesthetic ruling on keyboard transcriptions. Still, the anecdote lingers, and it raises a real question: what do we lose, and what do we unexpectedly gain, when the full battery of Stravinsky’s 1913 orchestra — its five flutes, its eight horns, its stamping strings — collapses into four hands on two manuals?
More than you’d think. Less than you’d fear.
The Hio duo — Miho and Masumi — attack the Rite with a rhythmic clarity that most orchestral performances, however distinguished, can’t quite match. That notorious “Augurs of Spring” ostinato, hammered out by divided strings in the original, lands here with a percussive directness that is almost shocking, like seeing a familiar face stripped of makeup. The piano does not bloom or breathe the way an orchestra does; it strikes and releases. In the Rite, that’s sometimes exactly right. Stravinsky’s counterpoint — so often swamped by sheer orchestral mass in the concert hall — surfaces with uncommon legibility. You can follow lines you’ve never consciously heard before even after dozens of orchestral hearings, which is no small thing.
What’s lost, of course, is color. The cor anglais solo that opens the work, that peculiarly Lithuanian-flavored melody Stravinsky claimed to have dreamed, needs the instrument’s reedy, disembodied quality to fully register as something from another world. A piano renders it graceful but mortal. The bassoon writing throughout — not melody so much as texture, not texture so much as atmosphere — simply cannot cross the gap. We supply it from memory, as the Hios no doubt know we will. And that act of imaginative collaboration between performers and informed listeners is, in its way, not nothing.
The Ravel is a different situation entirely. The Rapsodie espagnole began as a piano piece — Ravel composed the four-hand version in 1907 before orchestrating it — which means this rendition isn’t a reduction of anything. It’s a restoration, or at least a return to first principles. Ravel thought of his piano and orchestral versions as complementary, not competing, and he was right, though the orchestral version’s “Feria” finale is so vividly realized in that form that the piano equivalent sounds, unavoidably, like a sketch. The “Prélude à la nuit” loses nothing at all; its repeated four-note figure in the low register, that hypnotic falling cell, carries its full weight on the keyboard. The Hios handle the habanera rhythm of the second movement with appropriate suavity. One wishes for a slightly more volatile “Malagueña,” but the playing is clean and the voicing intelligent.
Then there is the Hindemith. The Sonata for piano four hands from 1938 is genuinely rare — I can think of only one other currently available release, and the Hios may have chosen it partly for that reason. Hindemith in 1938 was living in increasing precarity in Germany before his emigration to the United States, and the Sonata reflects something of his deliberately classical withdrawal from expressionism. It is solid, occasionally dour, constructed with the kind of contrapuntal integrity that makes you admire Hindemith even when you’re not sure you enjoy him. The Hios give it a committed and shapely account, and it earns its place here as the disc’s most genuinely obscure offering.
As a document of three works heard from an unusual angle, this recording has real value — particularly for the Rite, where the gain in rhythmic and contrapuntal transparency is genuine and sometimes revelatory. Whether you’ll return to it more than once or twice probably depends on how often you feel the need to hear familiar music made strange again by subtraction. Occasionally, that’s a real need. The Hios meet it honorably.
