Arizona Friends of Chamber Music wraps up its second annual summer concert series on Wednesday, Aug. 22, with the husband-and-wife team of Gary Steigerwalt and Dana Muller.
Both are pianists, and their program centers on works written for piano four hands, a genre they have been perfecting over the past 25 years.
Their Tucson program includes works by Schubert and Mendelssohn, a technically challenging waltz from Ravel and a new work by Tucson composer Daniel Asia.
Steigerwalt and Muller’s performances have captured the imagination of audiences and critics alike. Seeing the pair on one bench, fingers darting over the ivories with precision and extraordinary acrobatic dynamics, is exhilarating, according to reviews.
“They played up a storm in the Mendelssohn, tossing off brilliant parallel scale passages like so much tinsel, molding elegant phrases with a balance of delicacy and power as they manipulated the keyboard with the unity of a single player,” said Massachusetts’ Springfield Union-News.
“Their fingers literally flew across the keyboard as the balance of soft and loud sounds of the waltz vibrated with the life the pianists gave each note,” added the Green Valley (Arizona) News & Sun.
The summer concert series is one of the Friends’ most recent innovations under President James Reel. The Friends, which puts on the popular Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival each March and has introduced Tucson to a number of artists in the beginning of their careers who went on to become superstars, including pianist Lang Lang, rechristened its afternoon Piano and Friends series “Now Music.” The idea was to take some of those more intimate recitals outside the group’s Leo Rich Theatre home and into the community.
Now Music opens Oct. 14 with Canadian violinist Blake Pouliot at Leo Rich, where three of the series’ four events will take place. The series finale ZOFO Piano Duet in April will be held at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
