Compromise Is the Key to Their Music : Performing: Broadway and Markham say that they’re totally democratic but that they still keep their spontaneity.

Pianists don’t grow up hoping to be team players. They dream of the spotlight, of winning the Van Cliburn Competition, of soloing in Carnegie Hall, of pounding through the Tchaikovsky Concerto before 17,000 at the Hollywood Bowl.

Pianists Kenneth Broadway and Ralph Markham were no exception to thats rule. But circumstances led them down another path.

“It just wasn’t planned,” says Broadway, explaining how the musicians’ collaboration began. The pianists, both in Paris in the 1970s studying as soloists with the same teacher, “began reading through the four-hand literature for fun. Then we had the opportunity to actually give a concert and we decided to take advantage of that just to see how it would go.

“The success of that first performance led to an immediate re-engagement. Then someone else heard us play, then it just sort of evolved on its own until finally that’s what we were spending most of our time doing. But obviously the fact that we were immediately able to play together relatively effortlessly and that we had almost unknowingly set the foundation for an ensemble by studying with the same teachers . . . ended up putting us on the same track, the same wavelength, so that finally when we did actually perform together it just seemed to be magical.”

Now that Markham and Broadway are in their 13th year as a successful duo-piano team, the pianist’s assessment rings true. The key to that longevity, both of them assert, is compromise. The duo are “totally democratic,” even to the point of sharing the phone during an interview.

“If you are a personality that is excessively domineering or dogmatic,” says Markham in his turn, “I think it would be very difficult to continue an ensemble. I think it’s very important to have your own musical ideas and to maintain your own personality, but you have to be accommodating. The requirement is definitely one of being able to listen as well as to speak.”

In the small world of duo-pianists, where many of the pairings are siblings, their ensemble offers something different, says Broadway. “We are two very different people, not only in terms of physical appearance but in terms of types of person. And yet what we bring forward is (a single) thing that is, I would like to say, perfectly blended. I would like to think that the result is even better than each of us separately. It is hard to say that, but that is what we’re striving for.

“Going beyond that . . . just because there are two of us (it is important) that the music not be in any way metronomic or lacking in spontaneity. So, particularly in the romantic literature, we feel that you have to be able to play with the same rubato, the same freedom, the same expression that solo pianists would do, and we feel that we achieve that.”

Adds Markham: “I think so often that there’s a bit of a feeling of competition going on” between other duo-pianists. “One person is trying to outplay the other. In fact, what you’re trying to do is create one thing from two people, a unique thing that stands by itself that has just been created by that ensemble.”

An ongoing pursuit for the pianists is tracking down lost or forgotten works in the duo medium. They have unearthed works by Czerny in a Viennese archive and by Liszt in a London library, and in Munich found a sonata by Anton Rubinstein, which they recorded for RCA for European release. “It has almost become an ongoing hobby,” explains Broadway. “It’s like walking down a lane and seeing an unusual wildflower that you’ve never seen before.”

Says Markham: “A lot of the music has been forgotten for a reason, but if we find something that we think is worth doing, we will definitely champion it.” Their program Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre includes some of those finds: Liszt’s “Grande Valse di bravura,” and the two-piano version of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, as well as Grieg’s arrangement of Mozart’s Fantasy in C minor, K. 475.

“This is an extremely unusual piece that we resurrected,” says Broadway. “Basically, Grieg took the C-minor Fantasy and added a second piano part to it. But he didn’t do it in Mozart’s classical style; he did it in his own romantic idiom. I know this created quite an uproar in the late 1870s when it was published. Obviously there are some people who might have difficulty with this because it is altering Mozart. But in fact, for Grieg it was just his way of making a tribute to this great master.”

They regularly perform two-piano concertos with orchestras throughout Europe and America and are also commissioning new works for that medium. They take pride in their recent recording, with Yehudi Menuhin and the Royal Philharmonic, of Vaughan Williams’ neglected Concerto for Two Pianos. The Mozart bicentenary has filled out the pianists’ schedule with performances of his two- and three-piano concertos.

Many of their concerts, which total about 50 a year, take place in similarly off-the-beaten-path locales, as recent dates in Fargo, N. D., and Artesia, N. M., attest. Though the performing conditions can often be trying in small towns, they chalk it all up as a learning experience.

Relating just one of many such stories, Broadway remembers a mid-winter concert in Maine: “The pianos arrived frozen solid. By the time the concert began they were still cold. You would push the keys down and this arctic blast would come out on your fingers. I think it gave me a migraine by the end of it because it was so cold, but we did it, and that was a tremendous achievement to have just got through. It helps you to become a real pro and gives you the confidence to know that, whatever the circumstances, you can pull it off.”

Markham and Broadway will play Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $10 to $20. Information: (714) 854-4646.