Katia and Marielle  are featured artists at this year's BBC Proms, the world's largest music festival, having the rare chance to give three separate concerts. All three Proms are broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and the First Night of the Proms is broadcast on BBC TWO television at 8pm on 17th July

related links:
BBC TV
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00llqhk/BBC_Proms_2009_Prom_1_First_Night_of_the_Proms_Part_2/

http://video.aol.co.uk/video-detail/katia-and-marielle-labeque-proms-bbc2-part-3/1855899450

The Times
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/classical/article6675554.ece

by Igor Toronyi_Lalic

Katia and Marielle — the stars of the Proms this year.....
It’s not hard to see why they win friends. Their quiet barrage of prettiness, warmth and impishness is pretty irresistible. And in conversation, as in their piano playing, they seem to complement each other. Katia takes the extrovert treble line of engagement, hardly pausing for breath, while Marielle pads along behind, otherworldly, often starting or finishing sentences with a whimsical Gallic rumble.

Later at the Concertgebouw they are to play a Louis Andriessen piece, The Hague Hacking, which will receive its British premiere at the Proms on August 17....In fact their British debut  was at the Roundhouse, performing Boulez’s complex Structures, sweating it out in jeans and T-shirts.......
They dived into the deep end with tough contemporary repertoire such as Messiaen’s Vision de l’amen. One day while they were practising the work Messiaen, who was a professor at the Conservatoire, overheard them and suggested that they record the piece. An extraordinary first album put them firmly on the critical map. They started to work with contemporary composers but then an album of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue sold half a million copies and catapulted them to fame.

With success in the classical realm secured, Katia started experimenting around the edges....
Today they flit seamlessly between Waldbühne in Berlin and the post-rock scene at music festivals such as All Tomorrow’s Parties. They have worked with Sting and played for Madonna.

All of this cross-pollination feeds 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 first time. Even the new Andriessen piece was unravelled like a riff, Katia head-banging her way through the Dutch performance. Yet the concerto has been one of the hardest they have had to learn, they say: six months to master 16 minutes of music. And there’s no let-off...The piece works essentially like a game of tennis, notes flying from Katia to Marielle and back, a medieval musical technique called hocketing. The sonic effect is a thrill. “He has managed, somehow, to create a completely new concerto,” Katia says.

Expanding their repertory is a hugely important task because, to be frank, there’s not much out there. Many composers don’t like writing for the combination. “One piano is enough, they say,” Marielle says, laughing 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,” Katia says. “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 singers do with their backing musicians.

With their pianism so special, why don’t they play some solo performances? “I would feel lonely,” Marielle says, 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!”


BBC news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8155404.stm

the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jul/27/katia-marielle-labeque-pianists



The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/5933598/Marielle-and-Katia-Labeque-interview-for-BBC-Proms-2009.html

The Telegraph
“Thank goodness we then had Poulenc's Concerto for two Pianos to raise our spirits. It's been the party piece of the formidable Labèque sisters for years, but they still make it sound fresh, partly because they now play the deliciously sentimental passages with more freedom.
What followed – Elgar's rumbustious and melancholy In the South; Brahms's Alto Rhapsody and Bruckner's Psalm 150 – struck a weightier note and had some wonderful moments. But it was the café-concert charm and veiled melancholy of Poulence's concerto that left the deepest impression. Trifles aren't always trifling.” The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/5869400/BBC-Proms-2009-First-Night-of-the-Proms-at-the-Royal-Albert-Hall---review.html

The Independent
“the Labeque Sisters, kittenish Katia and demure Marielle, attended to the deliciously subversive nature of Poulenc’s Concerto in D for Two Pianos romping between skittish music hall burlesque and twilit reverie with idiomatic aplomb. The straight-faced Mozart parody of the Larghetto was beautifully weighed in favour of affection rather than fun.” The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/prom-1-bbc-symphony-orchestra-amp-chorus-belohlavek-royal-albert-hall-london-1752088.html


www.musicalcriticism.com
“Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos (here signalling the festival's concentration on music for multiple pianos this year) took up the central plank of the programme in between the two intervals. It is an utterly bizarre confection — 'a party piece' according to Robert Maycock in the programme notes — that mixes gamelan-imitation, Mozart-parody, baroque gestures, parlour music, and neo-classicism, into a twisting and turning score that you're never sure of. It is by turns droll, moving, funny, and thrilling. The through-line could never be convincing, but the sudden return of the gamelan-music at the end following a vertiginous finale did make some strange sense. Katia and Marielle Labèque, all stamping feet and leaping arms, were perfect soloists. The levity was maintained into their favoured encore repertoire, a cheerful and lusty miniature from Adolfo Berio.” Musicalcriticism.com
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/prom09-1-0709.shtml


www.classicalsource.com
“One piano became two after the first interval, the Labèque sisters performing their signature concerto. Katia took the lead as the most demonstrative pianist, several times threatening to fall off the stool, and the pair’s virtuosity carried all before them in the faster music. The bittersweet end to the first movement was well achieved and the second movement began airily. The finale fair raced away, the small but well-powered string section just about keeping pace as the pianists dazzled. As an encore the sisters sat at one piano for Polka by Adolfo Berio (1847-1942), Luciano Berio’s grandfather, thrown off with humour.” Classical source
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_prom_review.php?id=7282


entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
“Then, oddly, two very different pianists — Katia and Marielle Labeque, still the friskiest fillies on the keys — fizzed their way through Poulenc’s saucy Concerto for Two Pianos.” The Times
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/proms/article6718798.ece



Blogspot
http://classical-iconoclast.blogspot.com/2009/07/first-night-of-proms-2009-alice-coote.html


Prom 43 – Philharmonia/Salonen/Labeque
    * Andrew Clements
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 August 2009


The UK premiere of The Hague Hacking, Louis Andriessen's piece for two pianos and orchestra – the novelty in the Philharmonia's prom with music director Esa-Pekka Salonen – turned out to be anything but the extrovert romp one might have expected. The 18-minute score grew from an encore piece for two pianos, and comes with a whole bundle of unlikely musical connections: a dance popular in Dutch nightclubs in the 1990s; a song, O, O, the Hague, which has become the Dutch capital's unofficial anthem; and Liszt's second Hungarian Rhapsody, which Andriessen apparently first got to know through a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Then there's the idea of hocketing, in which a melody is split between two voices or instruments, so that they play or sing alternate notes. It's a technique Andriessen has used for many years, and here it fuses the two pianos into a single super-instrument, relying on exact co-ordination between the soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, who also gave the first performance of this piece in Los Angeles last year.

Yet their virtuosity is not flaunted, and the piece never becomes a brilliant showpiece or gets too carried away with its own rhythmic energy. Even towards the end, when the Hague tune is taken up by the whole orchestra as if harmonised by Messiaen after a bit too much communion wine, it carries its undertow of introspection with it, and never quite lets go.
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Classical music preview: The Hague Hacking, London
    * Andrew Clements
    * The Guardian, Saturday 15 August 2009

Another significant anniversary gets its due acknowledgement at the proms. Louis Andriessen, the most important Dutch composer of the last half century, celebrated his 70th birthday in June, and to mark the occasion, Monday's concert by the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen includes the UK premiere of his recent concerto for two pianos. For political as well as musical reasons, Andriessen generally avoids writing for a conventional orchestra, preferring more abrasive wind and keyboard-based sonorities for his hard-edged brand of minimalism, but The Hague Hacking, composed for Katia and Marielle Labèque who premiered it at the beginning of this year, is an exception. Andriessen says it's based upon two tunes, one that he remembered from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, the other a Dutch sing-along chorus about the city of The Hague. Both are deconstructed in the course of the piece which, he says, could be described as a toccata.

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Le Monde 19 Aout 2009
Renaud Machard

....The Hague Hacking, de Andriessen, qu'elles ont créé, en janvier, à Los Angeles, avec le chef Esa-Pekka Salonen (au pupitre à Londres, mais à la tête du Philharmonia Orchestra, dont il est le directeur musical), n'est assurément pas un 'crowd pleaser' ; cette composition remarquable est même d'une austérité déconcertante et d'autant moins 'payante' pour les pianistes que ses vraies difficultés (notamment rythmiques) ne sont pas 'spectaculaires'.

Les deux Françaises, qui ont joué trois fois cet été aux Proms, le prennent avec le sourire : avec le Concerto pour deux pianos de Poulenc, qui ne rate jamais son effet et qu'elles ont interprété au cours du concert d'ouverture, le 17 juillet, elles auront eu leur lot d'affection d'un public qui les adore - à juste titre car les deux musiciennes ont une générosité et une finesse de présence artistique qui n'ont d'égal que leur enviable professionnalisme (mise en place, précision, familiarité avec l'oeuvre).