Scenes from a duo piano performance by Katherine Dowling and Clark Schaufele
Pianists Katherine Dowling and Clark Schaufele performed a piano duo recital on Friday, Oct. 30, at the Brunton Auditorium. Dowling, an assistant professor of piano at Mt.A, and Schaufele, a collaborative pianist in Mt.A’s music department, presented a program of three pieces from the early 20th century: Maurice Ravel’s “La valse,” George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” and Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
“If you love the piano, you will love four-hands and two pianos, because there’s just more piano!” Dowling said in an interview with The Argosy, prior to the performance.
At the beginning of the program, two pianos faced each other on the stage. During their first selections, Dowling and Schaufele occasionally glanced at each other across their instruments. For the last piece, Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” the performers sat side by side, hands crossing over one another’s on the same instrument.
In addition to being musical collaborators, Dowling and Schaufele are married. They brought their two-year-old along to their interview with The Argosy. “We don’t play together very often,” Dowling said. “Usually one of us is with our son, and the other one is playing a concert, so to have both of us play is kind of unusual.”
“It’s wonderful, playing together,” Schaufele said. “I think there’s so much mutual respect in terms of music.” He described the experience of rehearsing and performing as a duo as both fun and meaningful. “We both get to engage with music so deeply as a pair, which is really cool.”
Schaufele explained that he and Dowling had performed two of their selections together in the past, but had never before collaborated on their opening number, Ravel’s La valse. The piece, completed in 1921, was meant by Ravel to bring to mind waltzing couples in an increasingly frenzied dance. Dowling noted during the concert that “La valse” has often been interpreted as a representation of birth, life, and death during the First World War.
Following “La valse,” Dowling and Schaufele played “An American in Paris” by Gershwin. The version they performed was their own adaptation of an arrangement for four-hands piano. “We’ve tried to take as many of the orchestral sounds that we can and put them in the piano,” Dowling said to The Argosy. Jazz-inspired and often bouncy, the piece imagines the feelings of a New Yorker walking through the streets of Paris.
Finally, sitting side by side, the performers played Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Schaufele introduced the piece as telling the story of an “almost druidic rite” in pagan Russia. Dowling, on the lower part, played the intense percussion part of the piece. “Trying to recreate that sound on the piano is just incredibly powerful and dramatic,” Dowling told The Argosy. Illustrating the sound was the choreography of Dowling and Schaufele’s hands crossing, leaping, and “getting in each other’s way.”
Dowling described the early 20th century as a time in Western art music where “people were being so experimental, trying so many new things.” The artists and composers of the three pieces would have come into contact, particularly in Paris: a hub for artistic creation. (A story of Gershwin asking to study with Ravel has become legend).
“It’s also interesting to think, all of this is very much in the shadow of World War One, right? And there’s all of this destruction, but there’s still all of this incredible creative energy at the same time,” Dowling said.
“I thought it was phenomenal,” said first-year music student and pianist Anna Lynnes to The Argosy after the performance. “Whenever there were loud parts, just how they were able to use the full force of their body to just produce the sound. And then even just like, the choreography of the silences, when they would just, like, fling their arms up into the air.”
Dowling will be performing a solo program of Modern and Romantic pieces titled Awake and Dreaming on Friday, Nov. 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the Brunton Auditorium. Admission is free for current Mt.A students. The program includes selections from her album of the same name, which received a JUNO nomination last year.
“You know the feeling when you first wake up?” she asked. “Hopefully it will leave everyone in this very dreamlike state.”