The Keys to Team Play : Markham and Broadway Find ‘Perfect Dialogue’ in Mozart Concerto

Of all Mozart’s piano concertos, the Concerto No. 10 for two pianos is unique: It’s the only one Mozart composed for himself and his sister, Nannerl, as the soloists. Perhaps that is the reason a later musician finds such “perfect dialogue” in the work.

“For us, it’s a little jewel,” says Kenneth Broadway, half of the Markham and Broadway duo-piano team that will play the piece with the Pacific Symphony tonight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

“It falls into that category of all Mozart’s double concertos . . . which are all special pieces. It is so perfect, if you toy around with it too much, it lessens it.”

It has been a “completely wonderful experience” playing the work “all over the place” this year during a 20-city North American tour with the Philharmonia Hungarica conducted by Yehudi Menuhin, according to Markham, who was taking his turn in a recent phone interview from their home in Vancouver, Canada.

“As a result, we feel it is completely a part of us,” he said. “We can sit back and carry on this dialogue without any kind of anxiety, which gets in the way every time.”

“That is why children play Mozart very well,” Broadway interjected: “their lack of anxiety.”

Despite the repeated performances, they are “always exploring new possibilities and new ideas and aspects of interpreting” this work, Markham said. “When we come back to an old piece, we always try to start as if we’ve not heard it before so it stays fresh.”

Still, for the Irvine Meadows program, they will have only two rehearsals with the orchestra: one the night before and one the day of the concert.

“That is always the way in playing a concerto,” Broadway said. “Yet it’s supposed to sound like you’ve played together all your lives. It’s frustrating, when that’s compared with the amount of hours we put in on our parts.”

Markham, who is Canadian, met Cleveland-born Broadway when they were students at the Cleveland Institute of Music. They have been working together since 1975. They declined to reveal their ages, however. “Oh, dear. That’s classified information,” Broadway said. “I don’t know if we give that information out. Better to let people guess.”

The pair should be familiar to local audiences. They gave a recital to benefit the Orange County AIDS Services Foundation at Saddleback College in 1989. They played for the Orange County Philharmonic Society at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in 1991. Most recently, they closed the California Music Teachers Assn.’s annual meeting in Long Beach in July with a recital and a master class.

To make a successful musical partnership, “you’ve got to have a pair of people who are both able to lead and to follow,” Markham said. “You have to have people who have strong enough temperaments in themselves so that they can make their own statements but who also are able to let the other person make his statement as well.

“Neither can dominate, or it would be lopsided. And neither can be subservient, either. You have to make that blend and combine the strengths of each person.”

The two play about 50 concerts a season, including “everything from every period. We have to,” Broadway said. “There is not an endless repertory for two pianos.”

As participants in the Yamaha Concert and Artists Program, the two will play two nine-foot matched Yamaha grands at the Saturday concert. This runs counter to the current movement that stresses using period instruments (or replicas) of the composer’s day.

Broadway dismisses the historical approach because “we’re very much of the feeling that if (those composers) had a modern instrument, they would have been delighted.”

“In fact,” Markham added, “when you’re playing a nine-foot piano, you have more variety and control, more color and dynamics than in a smaller piano. Besides, the question of style comes more directly from how you play the piano, rather than from the instrument itself.

“When you play Brahms,” he explained, “you’re going to use your full arm weight and the weight of your entire being. Mozart, you approach in a physically distinct way.

“But, after all, here we are playing a piece from the middle period of Mozart’s life in the great outdoors. I don’t think Mozart would ever have thought that this would be done to this piece, that it would be amplified and heard by thousands of people outside.

“I think it’s absolutely wonderful that people will be sitting on a lawn and listening to this divine music. But you have to help it out. Everything has been altered a little for these circumstances. But it’s much better to do that rather than the way it would have originally been done, and have nobody hear it.”

Duo pianists Ralph Markham and Kenneth Broadway will play Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos with the Pacific Symphony, led by Carl St. Clair, tonight at 8 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. The Mozart program also includes the Overture to “The Marriage of Figaro” and the Symphony No. 40. $10 to $44. (714) 740-2000 (TicketMaster).