Mr. High & Mr. Low

Four-hand piano playing, as it is practiced by most amateurs, is a little like a doubles match with everyone serving at the same time. But when two good professional pianists take time to master the exacting technique of playing together at the same keyboard, the result is often music-making of high order. Last week Manhattan audiences had a chance to hear the best four-hand team since the late, famed Josef Lhevinne played with his wife Rosina. Occasion: a concert at Carnegie Hall by young Viennese Pianists Joerg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda.

Limited Repertory. Seated on separate benches. Pianists Demus and Badura-Skoda worked their way through five little-heard pieces from the limited repertory of original four-hand works. The five: Mozart's Sonata in C. K.521, Hindemith's Sonata for Four Hands, three works by Schubert (who wrote more four-hand music than any other major composer). In some pieces, Demus played "low" (the bass part) and Badura-Skoda "high" (the treble), in others they switched positions. Since the bass player invariably tends to underpedal to avoid thickness, the pedaling throughout was done by the treble player. When they intertwined their arms in passages of labyrinthine difficulty, the pair presented the bewildering aspect of a two-headed Siva.

But the sound they produced was clean, relaxed, admirably unblurred. The music for the most part was richly ornamented, to take full advantage of the presence of 20 fingers on 88 keys. Demus and Badura-Skoda executed filigreed turns of Mozart, trickily syncopated rhythms of Hindemith, florid, zestful melodies of Schubert with a fine fluency and flair. Each throttled his individual sound, avoiding the pounding effect that often afflicts duo pianists playing on separate instruments.

Grand Tradition. Pianists Demus, 30, and Badura-Skoda, 31, met at Vienna's Academy of Music, started playing together purely for relaxation. Although they have made half a dozen recordings together (for Westminster), they still regard their four-hand playing as "amateur in the best sense," prefer to concentrate on their individual careers as soloists. Badura-Skoda specializes in Mozart ("I have the quicker fingers"), while Demus concentrates more on Schumann and the French repertory.

Chiefly because they were both schooled in "the sonority of the grand tradition," they find that their general approach to music is remarkably similar. Even so, they have problems. "Please, Paul," cries Demus when he is not getting enough pedal, "I'm starving." Occasionally, they get their signals crossed: once, each waited "for a terrible moment" for the other to make a solo entrance, finally came in together. But such lapses are rare, and none but the sharpest critical ears have managed to detect them. The reason, Badura-Skoda points out, is that most of the music they play is from a literature totally unfamiliar to modern audiences. "What we are doing," he says proudly, "is a very old-fashioned thing."

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