DUO Stephanie and Saar: Beethoven Dialogues

The husband-and-wife team of Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia – Duo Stephanie and Saar for short – have made a name for their thoughtful, resourceful programming. Their third album together is a case in point, devoted to four-hand arrangements of Beethoven's early string quartets, the Opus 18 cycle (Nos. 1, 4 and 6). The transcriptions, by Hugo Ulrich and Robert Wittmann, help us hear Beethoven’s writing in a fresh new light. Dense textures breathe anew, bold harmonic shifts are more exposed and melodies and counter-melodies are clarified.

Beethoven, “Dialogues” performed by Duo Stephanie and Saar (New Focus Recordings). The idea behind this high-minded disc had potential. Duo Stephani and Saar, playing four-hand piano, give us three of Beethoven’s early-period string quartets Op. 18 – No. 1, No. 4 and No. 6. I love anything arranged for piano. It can always be counted on to bring out new things in the music. And it’s heartwarming how this disc’s creators pay homage to the lead of visionary teachers including Karl Ulrich Schnabel and Leon Fleisher. Listening to the music, though, I was a little disappointed. On the one hand the novelty was there – I could barely recognize the music, even though I’ve heard the quartets a lot and paid close attention to them. On the other hand, the music sounded mechanical. It worked as a kind of exercise, but you get no sense that it is living and breathing the way you get when you hear a string quartet play it. Whether that’s the fault of the arrangers (Hugo Ulrich and Robert Wittmann) or the performers, or whether the quartets just don’t work on the piano, I’m not sure. Playing the string quartets as collaborative piano pieces does sound like an avenue worth exploring.

(Mary Kunz Goldman)

Before mechanical sound reproduction, large-scale music was often first experienced in piano transcriptions, some created by journeymen composers of talent. One such, Hugo Ulrich (1827-1872), born in Opole, Silesia, struggled financially, creating a piano trio (dedicated to his mentor, music editor Siegfried Dehn) and symphonies before resorting to transcriptions of symphonies and other works as subsistence labour. Of these faithful, yet pianistically rewarding works by Ulrich, Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia have chosen transcriptions -- done in collaboration with Robert Wittmann, another now-forgotten composer -- of three early Beethoven string quartets for piano four hands.

These transcriptions are based on a profound understanding of melody and the sublte progress of musical ideas, conveyed in a refined fashion by Ulrich and his partner. Likewise, Ho and Ahuvia prove to be uncommonly thoughtful and co-operative in these intimate efforts. The pianists themselves observe in CD booklet notes that the works contain Beethovenesque 'bravura passagework, powerful symphonic cadences, [and] diabolical four-part fugues.' These challenges they meet with abundant skill and self-effacing mastery. Ahuvia explains that he discovered these transcriptions when Leon Fleisher, his teacher at Baltimore's Peabody Institute, ordered his students to examine them as a way of revivifying Beethoven's spirit at the keyboard beyond his piano sonatas. Indeed, this is a transcendent reminder of past four-handed glories, following the Prague Piano Duo's vivid recording of the same composer's Seventh Symphony in Ulrich's transcription (on Praga SACD PRD/DSD 250219).

Before recordings and radio were invented, the piano represented one’s home entertainment center. If you wanted to hear a Beethoven string quartet, you had to seek out a live quartet performance, or you could simply play the piece on the piano, usually in an arrangement for one piano four hands. Thousands of these arrangements existed, although few remain in print. In 1980 Dover reprinted the Hugo Ulrich and Robert Wittmann Beethoven Quartet transcriptions. They are skillfully wrought for the piano, yet manage to retain the flavor of Beethoven’s original timbres in regard to textural transparency and voice leading, losing nothing in translation from strings to keyboard. What is more, they are rewarding to play and to hear, which is not always the case with four-hand arrangements.
Stephanie Ho and Saar Arhuvia began investigating the four-hand Beethoven quartets at the suggestion of their teacher Leon Fleisher, who encouraged his students to probe Beethoven beyond the iconic 32 solo piano sonatas. Aside from their impeccably calibrated ensemble work on all levels, Ho and Arhuvia bring a mindful, chamber-like aesthetic to these scores in terms of motivic interplay, balances, and dynamic scaling. Tempos for faster movements never exceed what strings can do comfortably; if anything, they tend to fall on the conservative side. Yet this allows for the Op. 18 No. 6 Scherzo’s cross-rhythmic phrases to settle and breathe over the bar lines, and the Op. 18 No. 4 Scherzoso quasi allegretto’s alternating staccato and sforzando markings to effectively register. On the other hand, most quartets can handle Op. 18 No. 1’s Allegro finale at a brighter, more incisive clip. By contrast, the Op. 18 No. 1 and 6 Adagios benefit not only from the duo’s vibrant pace but also the uniformity with which long lines pass back and forth between the pianists. Aside from a tinge of stridency in the loudest passages, the duo’s refined and intelligent interpretations are well recorded. - Jed Distler, Jan. 20, 2015