DOUBLE DREAM/LETTERS TO MILENA, KINGS PLACE
By Michael Church

Independent.co.uk
Friday, 20 February 2009

If classical improvisation is difficult, it’s doubly so when the goal
is transposition into jazz; how two pianists can combine together in
this way is hard to imagine.

But for the Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy, two heads have long been
better than one. His defining infant experience was hearing phrases
which came through the wall from a violinist who was practising next
door, and finding he could answer him on the piano. Later in life,
rehearsals for ‘Double Dream’ – in which he and the Norwegian pianist
Misha Alperin would turn Bach, Chopin, and Debussy into jazz – have
had for logistical reasons to take place over the telephone.

And with their Steinways interlocking in the perfect acoustic of
Kings Place, we heard the results. They started with the lights down,
opening with a rumination on Schumann’s ‘Prophet Bird’ which rang out
gorgeously in the gloom, then, with twin video screens focusing on
hands and faces – Alperin’s fizzing with excitement, Rudy’s gently
quizzical – they embarked on the most extraordinary classical/jazz
conversation I’ve ever heard.

Sometimes the classical pieces were first played straight, and
then ingeniously messed with – subverting a poised Chopin mazurka
by suddenly dropping it20a semitone, letting a Debussy Etude with a
walking bass suddenly run so fast that it took off into space. Using
a cross between a bagpipe and a mouth-organ, Alperin launched into
an Armenian dance by Komitas which Rudy countered with mournful
Arabic octaves; Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka’ came in obliquely and
stratospherically high, then found its feet in a majestic full-dress
performance.

A dainty tune by Haydn seemed to close the proceedings, was blown
to smithereens by monumental crashing chords, then resurfaced
like a perfumed musical box amid smoking ruins: in this interplay
between seriousness and mockery, nothing was what it seemed for
very long. We got boogie, stride, and bebop, but none of the expected
Mingus/Tatum/Peterson moments: these brilliant pianists could freewheel
in tandem through a wide range of styles, without once descending
to pastiche.

The following night’s collaboration was between Rudy and the actor
Peter Guinness: in ‘Letters to Milena’, Kafka’s love-letters to
his young paramour were accompanied by a selection of pieces from
Janacek’s ‘In the mists’ and ‘On an overgrown path’. The result was
hauntingly dramatic: the morose urgency with which Guinness infused
the words was answered by a kaleidoscope of emotions from the piano;
each art-form was enriched by the other.