There’s a moment in the opening bars of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole — the “Prélude à la nuit,” with its hypnotic repeated four-note descending figure — where you discover very quickly whether a piano duo has the goods. The passage is deceptively simple. It requires near-perfect dynamic matching, a shared sense of breath, and the kind of pianissimo control that can’t be taught past a certain point. It either happens or it doesn’t. With Mona and Rica Bard, it happens — magnificently.
These sisters, who have evidently been playing together since childhood and have absorbed guidance from some of the finest duo pianists alive — the Labèques, Alfons Kontarsky, the Duo Tal-Groethuysen — have made a debut album of entirely French repertoire that announces an important partnership. Not a promising one. An important one.
The Ravel is the heart of the disc for me. In its original orchestral form, the Rapsodie is one of Ravel’s most atmospheric achievements, a work that conjures Andalusia through the prism of a Frenchman’s imagination — which is to say, it conjures something more seductive than Spain itself. The piano-duo arrangement is Ravel’s own, predating the orchestral version, and it demands that two people together project what an orchestra can spread across a hundred players and a hundred square feet of stage. The Bards manage this with a naturalness that makes you stop thinking about the technical problem entirely. In the slow movements especially, their touch is so matched, so quietly luminous, that you genuinely lose track of where one player ends and the other begins.
Milhaud’s Scaramouche — written in 1937 for two pianos, dashed off with the cheerful velocity that Milhaud brought to almost everything — comes first on the program, and the Bards play it with exactly the right combination of wit and momentum. The finale’s Brazilian rhythms, borrowed from Milhaud’s earlier ballet L’homme et son désir, crackle and snap. But the slow middle movement, the “Modéré,” catches you off guard. It’s one of those pieces that seems, on paper, too simple to be moving and then, in reading, moves you entirely. Here it does.
Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, op. 22, is a suite of twelve character pieces that deserves far more attention than it typically gets outside France. Written in 1871, years before Carmen made Bizet’s posthumous reputation, it is a work of charm so refined it almost conceals its own sophistication. The Bards bring to it a clarity of articulation — each of the twelve pieces sharply characterized without exaggeration — that recalls what the best chamber orchestras used to bring to this repertoire. Think Munch and the Boston Symphony in their lighter French moments: affectionate but never sentimental, precise but never clinical.
Poulenc is the most serious business here. The Sonata for two pianos — premiered in 1953 by Poulenc himself with Jacques Février, and one of the composer’s most substantial late works — is not easy to hold together. Its emotional range is wide, wider than the music’s somewhat neoclassical surface lets on. The andante movement, lyrical in a way Poulenc could achieve when he set his ironic reflexes aside, receives from the Bards a reading of genuine depth. There is real lyricism here, unhurried and unaffected.
The Élégie, placed last, is an odd little piece — more nocturnal reverie than lamentation, except for one harsh harmonic interruption that arrives like an uninvited guest and then, just as abruptly, leaves. The Bards navigate this with intelligence.
A word about programming. The disc puts its most substantial works at the end — the Poulenc sonata and Élégie — while leading with the more immediately pleasurable Scaramouche, Rapsodie espagnole, and Jeux d’enfants. This is backwards in the traditional sense, like serving the mousse before the consommé. But the Poulenc is substantial enough to anchor things retrospectively, and by the time you’ve spent an hour in the Bards’ company, you’re content to follow wherever they lead.
The recorded sound is outstanding — fuller and more resonant than piano-duo recordings often manage, with a natural bloom around the instruments that suggests a sympathetic acoustic and careful microphone placement. The booklet notes, translated from the German, occasionally read with the slightly airless quality of literal translation. But that is a minor distraction.
What is not minor is the Bards themselves. Piano duos — two people at one or two instruments — live or die by their capacity to think and breathe as one organism while still making music rather than merely executing it. The Kontarsky brothers had that. The Labèques, in their prime, had it. The Bards, on this evidence, have it too. A remarkable debut.
