News from the world of the piano

Babayan and Argerich maintained the same positions for Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D K448, which they shaped with heightened elegance and buoyancy. If you didn’t peek, you would never had known which pianist was playing what – so seamless was their sharing and shaping of material. The Andante wove its miraculous spell as the collaborators answered one another like friends engaged in intimate conversation.

Prokofiev was back at the printed programme’s end, with Argerich taking the first part in Babayan’s transcription of Seven Piano Pieces, in their US premiere. The collection comprises selections from incidental music to stage versions of Hamlet and Eugene Onegin, the unfinished film The Queen of Spades, and the opera War and Peace, all written in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The pianists were showered with flowers at the end, some of which they handed to their fearless page-turners, and then returned for the night’s most enchanting music-making, two Rachmaninov selections. In the Barcarolle from the Suite No 1 Op 15, and Waltz from the Suite No 2, Op 17, Argerich and Babayan savoured every rhapsodic turn of phrase and virtuosic swirl.