Piano four hands performance at Sunday Concert Series features faculty composers

Thomas Stumpf, a piano teacher and co-director of the Opera Ensemble at Tufts, talks about a piece of music in terms of a public speech; having too many words or notes is self-indulgent, while having fewer and clearer notes reduces needless verbiage and cuts away the unnecessary weight. This is how he explains the nature of his latest composition, a duel piano piece titled "Four Times Twelve by Two," which he debuted at the music department’s Sunday Concert Series last weekend.

The concert, which featured Stumpf and Edith Auner, the coordinator of Applied Music and Outreach, exemplified some of the inventive composing talent at the music department.

The duo started the show with a piece by John McDonald, the music department chair, titled "Before(four)hand(s): Preludes for Piano, Two Played, Op .578."  The composition complimented the character of the next piece: "Mozart’s Sonata in F minor for 2 Pianos, Op. 34b." After intermission, the duo played Stumpf’s piece then ended the concert with the grandiose "Sonata in F minor for 2 Pianos, Op. 34b" by Brahms.

The two faculty-composed pieces were written especially for Auner and Stumpf. It was clear that each pianist was playing the part that was meant for them, both as individual musicians with different styles and as a pair with strong and natural musical synchronicity.

McDonald’s piece, which Stumpf described as a “mixture of humor with a little wistful, melancholy thrown in,” was played by Auner and Stumpf side-by-side on the same piano. Auner played a part with many light and quickly moving trills in the higher octaves of the piano, while Stumpf played the lower part, equally light and supportive in adding texture-giving undertones to the pieces.

Stumpf’s piece, completed nine days before the concert date, was a synthesis of slightly-nefarious sounding themes, avant-garde simplicity and heart-felt emotion. It is the second composition in his ongoing series inspired by his friend, David Fullam, who painted wood landscape scenes. Fullam painted on square canvasses, a notion that appealed to Stumpf because of the way an art piece becomes legible to the spectator.

“If you have an oblong thing you’ll tend to go from left to right and read it as it were," Stumpf said. "You can’t really do the same thing if you have a square canvass … The eye sort of wanders around.”

In many ways, their performance epitomized their relationship throughout the extent of their musical careers. While receiving her masters at the New England Conservatory, Auner was a student of Stumpf, who taught piano at the time.

“[We both established] the same understanding of phrases and what we think makes a beautiful phrase," Auner said. "We have a similar way that music takes place in time that we don’t have to discuss or argue about at all.”

Their cues, breaths and rests were natural and well-matched in their performance, a feat that is not easy when there are quick cadences and overlapping chords.

“We don’t have a lot of talking in rehearsal,” Stumpf said. “Now that’s a style thing, too. Some people like to intellectualize and to talk and if you don’t talk everything through then what kind of rehearsal was it. I like it better if you can communicate through the music.”