Two Pianos, One Passion: Al Bustan Festival Concert

Two Pianos, One Passion

On March 9, the Fifteenth Al Bustan International Festival for Music and the Arts brought to Assembly Hall the prizewinning Bulgarian duo, Angelika Genova and Liuben Dimitrov, in a piano concert entitled "Two Pianos, One Passion."

The larger-than-life and powerfully evocative undertones of Maurice Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe" set the stage for the concert. Later, the duo's performance of Franz Liszt's nostalgic "Reminiscences of Don Juan" was punctuated by a musical juxtaposition of high-strung and low-key moments in synchronized two-piano form.

The concert's most powerful pieces, however, were the jazzy melodies of the symphonic dances taken from Leonard Bernstein's famous West Side Story, a musical so successful it was turned into a movie in 1961 by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. The evening concluded on an equally delightful, albeit milder, note with an exquisite rendition of Maurice Ravel's "Rhapsodie Espagnole," purposely written in 1907 for two pianos.

Genova and Dimitrov received standing ovations throughout the evening, with thundering applause marking the end of every single piece they played, including repetitive encores. The audience at Assembly Hall spoke ecstatically of their performance. Edgar Davidian, a staff writer at the local French daily L'Orient Le Jour, said that he has never before witnessed any other piano duo who possessed Genova and Dimitrov's ability to transform into sounds so homogenously and powerfully the so-called "one-body-with-four-hands ideal."

During the first three years of their launch as the Genova and Dimitrov Piano Duo in 1995, they won all the renowned piano duo competitions worldwide. These included the 1995 Bellini Music Competition, the 1996 ARD Music Competition, the 1996 Tokyo Piano Duo Competition, and the 1997 Murray Dranoff Piano Duo Competition. It was thus that the sensational international concert career of the two young virtuosos began.

"Initially, we actually both wanted to be soloists," commented Genova, "but one day shortly before we were both due to go to Korea to compete in a solo competition, we found that there was only one room left at the music academy to practice. It had two pianos, though. So we started to warm up together by playing at the same time the Chopin Etude Opus 25 Number 11. We thought we'd sprouted wings!"

Both artists were born in Bulgaria of Greek origin, have been playing piano since they were five years old, went through special music schools for talented children, and debuted in orchestra at the age of nine. In 2005, for their exceptional artistic achievements they were awarded the honorary citizenship by the German Federal Government.