The Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo Recital

Siam Ratchada Music Auditorium. Bangkok, Thailand. November 25, 2012. Husband and wife team, Evan Hirsch and Sally Pinkas, are based at Dartmouth and Brandeis Colleges in New England, but roam the world presenting delightful duo-piano and piano four hands recitals. Two pianos are not always available at some of the smaller venues they play at, so they have the advantage of switching to piano four hands only. For tonight's recital, they were fortunate to have a Steinway and a Bechstein grand available. All four works on the easy-to-take program were beautifully played by pianists who are perfectly tuned to each other: Mozart's Andante and Variations, Copland's Billy the Kid Suite, Schubert's Fantasia in F Minor, and Milhaud's Saramouche. The fact that there were only 15 in the audience did not deter Hirsch and Pinkas from playing an encore following the hearty (but necessarily low-decibel) applause from the sparse audience. During the intermission, I told Hirsch and Pinkas not to take the low turnout personally, that there just wasn't much of an audience for classical piano in Bangkok, and that's a fact.