Quatre Mains
| 1. | Introduction | 00:00:50 |
| 2. | Debussy: En blanc et noir for Two Pianos | 00:17:59 |
| 3. | The Rite of Spring for Piano, Four Hands | 00:39:40 |
PROGRAM
|
Claude Debussy (1862–1918) |
En blanc et noir for Two Pianos (1915) Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Piano I; Alessio Bax, Piano II |
|
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) |
The Rite of Spring for Piano, Four Hands (1913) Juho Pohjonen, Piano; Gloria Chien, Piano |
| Title | Date |
|---|---|
| Streaming live | {{ViewModel.StreamingOn.date}}, {{ViewModel.StreamingOn.time}} |
| Off-sale on | {{ViewModel.OffSaleDate.date}}, {{ViewModel.OffSaleDate.time}} |
| Available on-demand until | {{ViewModel.AvailableUntil.date}}, {{ViewModel.AvailableUntil.time}} |
{{ViewModel.BuySubscription.prompt}}
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Alessio Bax
Gloria Chien
Juho Pohjonen
Award-winning pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet enjoys a prolific recording and international concert career, with performances described as possessing “exquisite sensibilty, delivered with the most subtly varied, beautiful sound” (Seen and Heard Magazine). He has performed with the Cleveland, NHK Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony and London Philharmonic orchestras, and has collaborated with many renowned conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Gianandrea Noseda, Vasily Petrenko, Ludovic Morlot, Edward Gardner, and Louis Langrée.
Bavouzet’s recital schedule takes him across four continents in the 2025–26 season, with performances at major venues such as Sydney’s City Recital Hall, Kyoto Concert Hall, Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Center, Stockholm’s Queen Silvia Concert Hall, the Glasshouse International Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, and Lincoln Center. Orchestral collaborations include the Queensland, Trondheim, Aalborg, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras as well as Staatskapelle Weimar and others.
In recent seasons, he has appeared with the Philharmonia Orchestra (on an eight-concert tour of China, under Lan Shui), Philadelphia Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Shanghai, and the São Paulo, Adelaide, Sydney, Tokyo Metropolitan, and BBC Symphony Orchestras. He play-directed a three-concerto program with the Seattle Symphony and toured the Baltics with Manchester Camerata. He is a frequent guest at the Verbier and Bravo! Vail Music Festivals, and a regular recitalist at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Bavouzet’s recordings have garnered multiple Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Diapason d’Or, and Choc de l’Année awards. Recording exclusively on the Chandos label, his most recent release, Ravel: Complete Works for Solo Piano, was praised by Gramophone for its “seasoned mastery, stylish perception and caring commitment to [the] repertoire.” He performs the complete works of Ravel in recital at over twenty venues in Ravel’s 150th-anniversary year. Other notable recordings include the complete Haydn Piano Sonatas series, which was hailed by Gramophone as “a modern benchmark”; Pierre Sancan: A Musical Tribute with the BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier; The Beethoven Connection, which earned multiple accolades from publications including the New York Times (following his much-lauded complete Beethoven Sonatas, and play-conducting Beethoven’s Piano Concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra); the complete Mozart Piano Concertos with the Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy; and Bartók’s and Prokofiev’s complete Piano Concertos with the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda, the latter winning in the Concerto category at the 2014 Gramophone Awards.
Bavouzet has worked closely with Sir Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zoltan Kocsis, György Kurtág, Maurice Ohana, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bruno Mantovani, and Jörg Widmann, and is also a champion of lesser-known French music, notably that of Gabriel Pierné and Albéric Magnard. In 2012 he was the ICMA Artist of the Year, and in 2008 was awarded Beijing’s first ever Elite Prize for his Beethoven Sonatas series.
He is the International Visiting Artist in Keyboard Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music.
Alessio Bax catapulted to prominence with First Prize wins at both the Leeds and Hamamatsu International Piano Competitions. He has appeared with more than 150 orchestras, including the London, Royal, and St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestras, the Boston, Dallas, and Sydney Symphonies, and the NHK Symphony in Japan, collaborating with such eminent conductors as Marin Alsop, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Simon Rattle, Yuri Temirkanov, and Jaap van Zweden. He released his 11th Signum Classics album, Italian Inspirations, whose program was also the vehicle for his solo recital debut at New York’s 92nd Street Y as well as on tour. He and his regular piano duo partner, Lucille Chung, have given recitals at Lincoln Center and were featured with the St. Louis Symphony and Stéphane Denève. This season he makes his debut with the Milwaukee Symphony, and will return for the fourth time for two recitals at the historic Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Last summer he made return appearances at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival and at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival with the Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi conducting. At age 14, Bax graduated with top honors from the conservatory of Bari, his hometown in Italy, and after further studies in Europe, he moved to the United States in 1994. A Steinway artist, he lives in New York City with pianist Lucille Chung and their daughter, Mila. He is a former member of CMS’s Bowers Program and on the faculty at the New England Conservatory.
Pianist Gloria Chien has a diverse musical life as a performer, concert presenter, and educator. She made her orchestral debut at age 16 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard. In 2009 she launched String Theory, a chamber music series in Chattanooga, and the following year was appointed Director of the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo. In 2017, she joined her husband, violinist Soovin Kim, as Co-Artistic Director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont. The duo became Artistic Directors at Chamber Music Northwest in 2020, and were named the recipients of the 2021 Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music from CMS. Ms. Chien received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from New England Conservatory, where she was named the Advisor for the prestigious Institute for Concert Artists in 2024. She is an artist-in-residence at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee; a Steinway Artist; and an alum of CMS’s Bowers Program.
Pianist Juho Pohjonen is in demand internationally as an orchestral soloist, recitalist, and chamber performer. An ardent exponent of Scandinavian music, he has a growing discography offering music by Finnish compatriots such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho, and Jean Sibelius. Recent engagements include the Taiwan, BBC, and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras; the Cleveland and Minnesota orchestras; and the symphonies of San Francisco, Atlanta, New Jersey, and Colorado. Pohjonen is an alum of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program and enjoys an ongoing relationship with the organization. Pohjonen earned a master’s degree from Meri Louhos and Hui-Ying Liu-Tawaststjerna at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. He was selected by Sir András Schiff as the winner of the 2009 Klavier Festival Ruhr Scholarship. In 2019, Pohjonen launched MyPianist, an AI-based app that provides interactive piano accompaniment.