MUSIC REVIEW : Cipa, Misha Dichter in Duo-Piano Program

How do we love piano duets? Whether played by four hands at one instrument, or full-out, with two pianists at two grand pianos, it is an activity which may be more fun for the doers than for the observers. At least that is how we usually feel after watching Cipa and Misha Dichter do it.

The long-married couple, who made their debut as a duo-piano team in Hollywood Bowl, all of 19 years ago, gave an engaging program of unhackneyed works at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, Monday night, a recital attended by a friendly audience in the 1,000-seat theater.

But, as pleasant as this agenda of music by Mozart, Schubert, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff sounded, one still suspected it must have felt more delightful to the participants than it did to the listener.

The Dichters, still young, still attractive, and very accomplished musically, do not create excitement. They play the pianos, and well; they do not raise temperatures.

The almost complete lack of urgency and compulsion in their performances is mirrored in the slow and quiet way they enter and leave the stage: politely, elegantly, without panache. And, even in the most complex, 64th-note passages, they show no sign of perspiration.

At this recital, they began even more languidly than usual, with Mozart’s Sonata in F for piano, four hands, K. 497, in a reading of neatness and diffidence.

They showed considerably more signs of life in another four-hand work, Schubert’s Sonata in C (“Grand Duo”), D. 812, in which the natural flow of the ascending Schubertian line did indicate genuine musical excitement, especially as they delineated the irresistible and contrasting inner movements. The work, largely unfamiliar even to rabid Schubertians, is a thrilling one; some of its frissons materialized here.

The best part of the evening came last, in a virtuosic but calm display of the lush, Romantic rhetoric in Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 1, Opus 5.

Before that, the couple good-humoredly revived Shostakovich’s brief Concertino in A minor, Opus 94. Afterward, they took one encore, a Slavonic Dance by Dvorak.