Schubert’s song “Der Erlkönig” is based on a Goethe poem about a child chased and then snuffed out by a bogeyman, a variation on universal nighttime fears. The piano duo Anderson & Roe were attempting to record their virtuosic, fantastical arrangement of the piece when a toddler’s cry wafted through the supposedly empty concert hall of the State University of New York’s Performing Arts Center in Purchase.
The musicians and ever-imperturbable producer Steven Epstein tried to wait it out a bit, but the wails kept on as if the kid could feel the bogeyman closing in. Finally, Epstein left his station to see about rescuing the session, if not the child. Elizabeth Joy Roe, one-half of the piano duo, had another, mischievous idea: “Hey, maybe we should leave it — it’s totally in keeping with the piece, after all!”
Eventually, the child mysteriously disappeared, Epstein returned to the controls, and the Anderson & Roe recording resumed, with “Der Erlkönig” and other works of a nocturnal feel duly documented for When Words Fade: Night Songs for Piano Duo, the sophomore release by Roe and her piano partner, Greg Anderson. The album — presenting the pair’s instrumental versions of vocal pieces down through the ages — is on the label of Steinway & Sons (owned by the parent company of this magazine). Its title takes a cue from Heinrich Heine, the highly quotable 19th-century German poet and journalist, who famously said, “When words leave off, music begins.”
This idea — that music can express powerful impressions and emotions when words can’t quite, particularly in the wee-hour realm of obsessions and dreams — drives Anderson & Roe’s set of ingenious arrangements for two pianos and piano four-hands. Along with the Schubert, When Words Fade ranges from Baroque arias (by Vivaldi and Englishman Thomas Arne) and mash-ups of famous operatic numbers (from Mozart’s Magic Flute and Bizet’s Carmen) to amorous vocalise (Rachmaninoff and Villa-Lobos) and songs of moonlight and lovelorn romance (Schumann and Belgian songsmith Jacques Brel). There is even a sequence of disparate contemporary pop and rock tunes: Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” and Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.”
“The overarching theme of the record is the psychology of the night — mystery and seduction, dreams and nightmares, darkness both literal and figurative,” explained Anderson. “And the psychology of the lyrics or story resonates in the music even without the words. There can be surprising musical connections between pieces, too. The way we do them, ‘Billie Jean’ and Vivaldi’s aria ‘A Rain of Tears’ have similar textures and are both rhythmically pointillistic. It’s sort of shocking to hear the two and realize how similar they are.
“Then pieces like ‘Der Erlkönig’ and ‘Paranoid Android’ are both sensational, dramatic nightmares, thematically and musically,” Anderson added. “And the Arne aria ‘Glitt’ring Sun’ and Coldplay’s ‘Viva la Vida’ go together in the way they close the album, one being an evocation of the dawn and the other a seize-the-day song.”
To Anderson, the aim of these arrangements is comparable to that of Liszt’s paraphrases of bel canto operas and instrumental treatments of Schubert songs. “The idea is to give the music new life in a fresh setting,” he said. “And the arrangements vary in how liberal they are. The Schubert and Vivaldi are relatively straightforward stylistically, while the four-hands ‘Billie Jean’ is a transformative rearrangement. It sounds less like a pop song and more like a classical piece, with a toccata-like rhythm and more chromatic harmonies.
“We always try to do what the music seems to ask for,” Anderson added. “In the case of Brel, it was the character of his performances — the way he almost spat into the microphone with intensity — that conveyed the art in his music, not his fairly nondescript melodies. So our arrangement of his songs for a concert piece [‘Mathilde, Marieke et Madeleine’] makes the music bigger, trying to capture the spirit of the song rather than keep to the letter.”
Now based in New Haven, Connecticut, Anderson and Roe met in 2000 while freshmen
at the Juilliard School. They performed across the country together and recorded the
2008 album Reimagine, gaining a following not only for their traditional concert performances but for their stylishly conceptual (if occasionally hammy) YouTube videos
for the “Carmen Fantasy,” Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango” and Mozart’s Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, among other pieces.
“The videos are designed for a YouTube audience and the fact that the site has so
many distractions, with the ads, comments, et cetera,” Anderson said. “We aim for the videos to be eye-catching, so we can hold a viewer’s attention long enough that they become invested in the music.” Roe added, “But even if it’s just a straight performance, the visual aspect of what we do is like choreography, especially with the very physical arrangements for four-hands. With something like ‘Libertango,’ which we recorded on our first album, what our hands are doing relates to the friction between dancers in the tango. The videos illustrate the appeal of that for people beyond the concert hall.”
The CD of When Words Fade comes with a bonus DVD that features the duo’s self-produced videos for “Billie Jean,” “Carmen Fantasy” and “A Rain of Tears,” as well as a new, professionally produced video by Matthew Brown for “Der Erlkönig” that was shot at the Steinway factory in Queens, New York.
