They tackled the dissonances of the second movement famously, reliably weaving the fabric of their two parts away from, then back to, one another, and mastering the piece’s unexpected intervals. Next, in a rarely-heard arrangement that Dmitri Shostakovich made of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, there were echoes of a soldier’s march in the first movement, which the pianists, both imposing figures, met with strong bodily alignment. The third movement, contrasts an airy, sweet genre, perhaps reflecting what the world had once been, and as a demonstrative appeal for what, in the context of war, Debussy wished for again as the “present”. First on the programme was Claude Debussy’s En blanc et noir, composed in the midst of grave uncertainties around World War 1. The central movement bears a dedication to the memory of a French army officer who had recently been killed in action. The stage itself was promising: two Steinway concert grands nestled into one other like a single body the audience seated in elevated rows in the building’s more informal Lucerne Hall. Debussy insisted En blanc et noir (1915) was not a comment on the first World War, but since virtually all of his correspondence from this period indicates a near obsession with the subject, this claim is debatable.
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