In an hotel in Amsterdam, the Labèque sisters, the finest and chicest
piano duo performing in the world today, want to talk shoes.
Katia and Marielle — the stars of the Proms this year, with
appearances in three concerts — think about clothes in a way that few
else do in classical music. It’s all Dior tops and skinny jeans for
these two. I’m concerned for them, however. Will they be able to match
their fellow opening-night performer Stephen Hough's green velvet
slippers? “Well,” Katia rejoins, “I’m wearing Louboutin.” That means
5in heels and red soles. Touché.

Louis Andriessen, the Dutch composer of the tricky new piece, Hague
Hacking, that the sisters will give the British premiere of at the
Proms on August 17, loved these flashy numbers so much that he asked
Katia to wear them for every performance of his piece. 'But the stairs
are so high,' Marielle reminds Katia.

“Oh god,” Katia looks at her sister with terror, “the stairs!” The
stairs to the stage of the Concertgebouw are a neck-breakable affair:
steep and carpeted. “I will carry her down!” says Marielle with
chivalric speed and concern and less chivalric laughter. Theirs is the
sort of relationship, and Marielle the sort of person, where it’s not
inconceivable that she might try a Stannah Stairlift descent.

In the end, the concert comes and the shoes do their duty. The Proms -
for performers, a flat affair - will have no such stair-aerobics. For
the audience however, it could still be a toughie on the neck, with
stars on the stage and perhaps even more in the audience - maybe Sting
or Madonna or perhaps even Herbie Hancock’s nimble jazzy fingers
digging away at an interval ice cream.

After thirty years of criss-crossing the worlds of jazz, pop and
classical music, the sisters have acquired a list of friends that
reads like a Grammy award ceremony. Chick Corea and John McLaughlin
(Katia and he were an item) the late Miles Davis, Ira Gershwin and
Olivier Messiaen, Herbie, Sting and Madonna have all been close and
several have had a habit of popping by their gigs. Miles even wrote a
song for Katia. “He wrote two tunes on my name,” she says, explaining
how he kept this fact from her till the last minute. “He called them
Katia and the Katia Prelude. What more could you dream of? It was
great.”

They’re great too. Their quiet barrage of prettiness, warmth and
impishness is irresistible, as is their conversation, which tumbles
along engagingly like one of their performances, Katia taking the
extroverted treble line of engagement, hardly ever pausing for breath,
and Marielle padding along behind, in an otherworldly way, often
starting or finishing sentences with a low, whimsical Gallic rumble.

In their unruly appearance and moochy way of walking, they belong more
to the Marquee Club or the Roundhouse than the Wigmore Hall. And this
is where they began. Long before it was fashionable, the Labèques were
breaking down barriers, sweating it out in jeans and T-shirts
performing Boulez’s complex Structures with the composer at the
Roundhouse. At their New York debut in the 1980s, they performed
Messiaen and Stravinsky and jammed with John McLaughlin. “One rocker
ran up to me,” says Katia, “desperate to know what it was the we were
playing. ‘Stravinsky,’ I said. ‘That guy’s great!’ he said, ‘Does he
have a band?’”

Life began conventionally for them on the Basq Coast in France in the fifties. Their
first teacher was their mother, who had been taught by Marguerite
Long, and she set up the first incarnation of the duo, when Marielle
was 6 and Katia 8. Within a few minutes of getting them down to the
piano, they began squabbling, pushing each other off the chair in the
battle to control the pedals. From then on, through their teenage
years at the Paris Conservatoire, they studied as soloists. Only after
they graduated did they give duetting another crack. Though this time
with one piano, and one set of pedals, each.

They dived straight into the deep with tough contemporary repertoire
such as Messiaen’s Vision de l’amen. One day Messiaen – who was a
Professor at the Conservatoire – knocked on the door. “It’s the kind
of story no one believes but for us this was normal,” she explains. He
overheard them, asked to sit in on their practice and at the end
invited them to record the piece under his artistic direction. “For us
that was perfect. A complete dream,” explains Katia, “And that was our
first record.” One that put them firmly on the critical map.

They started to work with contemporary composers, slowly expanding the
repertoire. On a trip to see Luciano Berio in Los Angeles, someone
suggested that they do Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which up until
then had always been considered light entertainment. The album they
made for Phillips sold half a million copies and catapulted them to
worldwide fame.

With success in the classical realm secured, Katia started
experimenting around the edges. She started dating John McLaughlin –and fell in with
some jazz greats: Chick Corea, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Davis
became such a big fan, he would attend all the sisters’ American gigs.

Today they flit seamlessly between Waldbühne and the post-rock scene
at music festivals like All Tomorrow’s Parties. They’ve worked with
Sting - who Katia persuaded to perform John Dowland's lute songs – and
played for Madonna, who, says Katia, loves her Satie and Ravel - “she
knows a lot about classical music'. They now have a musical foundation
in Rome and Katia a band. All of which cross-pollination has fed
straight into their pianism. The intense, improvisatory quality of
their playing is born of these experimental ventures. Whether Mozart
or Stravinsky, their musical line always sounds as if it is being
woven for the very first time.

Even the new Andriessen piece was unravelled like a riff, Katia
head-banging her way through the Dutch performance like it was another
McLaughlin set. Yet, the concerto has been one of the hardest they’ve
ever had to learn. Six months to master 16 minutes of music. And
there’s no letting off, explains Katia: “You can’t abandon it for one
day. It is like building up your reflexes. But when you master it you
can really have some fun.” In November and December of last year they
practiced nothing else.

But the illusion of improvisation is the genius of their performances.
In all their recordings there is a deceptive sprezzatura that is born
of throwing the preparation to the winds and hanging onto each others
ears. “We never decide in advance how to phrase something,” insists
Marielle. “That would be the end of the music.”

For her current guests in her house in Rome, the Andriessen piece
apparently sounds like a piano tuner. “They’re all asking me what I am
doing in there?” Marielle laughs. The confusion is understandable. The
piece works essentially like a game of tennis, notes flying from Katia
to Marielle and back, which is a medieval technique called hocketing.
The sonic effect is a thrill, especially in the way that Andriessen
scores it, mounting the rhythmical pianistic match over an orchestral
haze, all of which is allowed to crawl slowly towards an epiphany. “He
has managed somehow to create a completely new concerto,” says Katia,
“and it is so rare for a composer to bring us something that we’ve
never seen before.”

Expanding their admittedly quite small repertoire is hugely important
to them. Their commissions alone – a new Golijov work is in the
pipeline - is making this one of the most creative periods for the duo
repertory. They’ve even started digging backwards into the classical
and baroque eras, where there are vast untapped resources. They’ve
even commissioned two replica Baroque pianos, whose tiny keyboard and
thin keys terrified Marielle at first.

“It was really frightening because I could see the dates for the
concert arriving and I didn’t have the instrument ready,” explains
Marielle. “Then I received this little baby and I thought, ‘Oh my
god!’ Katia’s hands are small so she can go fast. But what if I hit a
wrong note.”

Without this expansion, exploration and collaboration, piano duetting
can be sidelined, Katia laments. Many composers don’t like writing for
the combination. “’One piano is enough’, they say,” Marielle laughs
stoically, “And sometimes it’s true.”

What makes a good two piano piece work above all else is dialogue. And
the same is true of a good performance. “When people say, ‘It was so
great, you sounded like one’, we don’t find that necessarily
complimentary,” says Katia. “We like to sound like two different
voices!”

The trick, they say, is to learn how not to play together, how to bend
around each other like a singer does with their backing musicians.
“Very often piano duets are so conscious of playing together that it
sounds like a machine,” says Katia. Precision and synchronisation is
not the point of piano duetting, though it has become the point for
some, mourns Marielle. “Most of the time I don’t even enjoy listening
to two piano recordings,” she adds.

What some fans might mourn is that we won’t ever get to hear Marielle
or Katia perform solo. Why will they never go it alone? “I would feel
lonely,” says Marielle, smiling shyly.

Katia does sometimes contemplate this. But then she sticks on a CD by
the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, 'and I feel fine again,” she
says. “Anyway,” she adds, letting out a huge Gallic puff, “it’s so
much less work!”

*Katia and Marielle Labèque perform at the opening night of the Proms,
Friday July 17, and on August 9 & 17 (www.bbc.co.uk/proms)


--

Igor Toronyi-Lalic