Four hands, one piano: Concert celebrates women composers

At their upcoming “Celebrating Women in Music: Exploring Works for Piano Duet” concert in Mountain View, musicians Gabriela Calderón Cornejo and Astrid Morales Torres will lend each other a hand – both hands, actually – when they join forces in a piano four hands recital. The program features works by classical female composers, past and present, from several continents.

Piano four hands is a type of duet in which two pianists play at the same time, on the same piano, with one taking the upper, right-side part (primo) and the second taking the lower, left-side part (secundo). 

“You have to decide, how are we going to position ourselves to not clash with each other,” Calderón Cornejo said, with some pieces requiring both pianists to share the middle register, with no small degree of physical “coordinating and choreographing.” The duo will be alternating who takes the primo part and who takes the secundo from piece to piece, she said.

Calderón Cornejo, who’s originally from Costa Rica, came to the U.S. to earn masters and doctorate degrees in piano performance and has since made it her home. She is a faculty member of the Community School of Music and Arts (CSMA), where the March 16 concert will be held, and has extensive experience as both a solo and ensemble performer. In recent years, she’s developed a particular interest in exploring and promoting lesser-known works by Latin American female composers, including via her first studio album, “Musas.”

“They didn’t have a platform to bring exposure to their music,” she reflected on the under-heralded composers that she champions.

The concert’s program expands this interest to include other regions, featuring six works by women composers from different countries, including Mel Bonis (France), Inah Machado Sandoval (Brazil), Karalyn Schubring (United States), Ruth Schönthal (Germany), Beatriz Lockhart (Uruguay) and Eleanor Alberga (Jamaica, now based in the United Kingdom) representing a range of styles.

Sandoval’s “very cute” piece “Branca de Neve e os Sete Anões,” for example, is based on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” including a movement for each and every dwarf, from Doc to Dopey, and incorporating Brazilian folk traits. Schubring’s “Wide Open” and Schönthal’s “Bouquets for Margaret: Five Duets for Piano Four-Hands” both celebrate elements of nature.

Calderón Cornejo said she and Morales Torres chose to include Schubring in particular because they felt it was important to include a young, current American composer trying to “make a path for herself” in the music world. Her composition evokes “the experience of being outside in the summer with some thunder and some rain … like when you play as a kid outside,” she said. Bonis’ “Les Gitanos Valse Espagnole for piano four hands” is written in a Spanish style, while the Uruguayan Lockhart’s “Joropo” is Venezuelan in influence and style. 

“She was living there (Venezuela) for a while because she was in exile due to the war in Uruguay,” Calderón Cornejo noted. These pieces are examples of “how composers bring attention to other elements from other countries that have significance for them.”

Alberga’s rhythmic, unusual “3-Day Mix” is “a more bombastic one,” she said, “featuring “a lot of alternation between patterns and then a lot of conversation between the two parts of the piano. It’s more like sound effects, and how to create bigger textures and smaller textures.”

Calderón Cornejo met Morales Torres, an accomplished pianist and educator in her own right, at an international piano conference last year and quickly recognized her as a kindred spirit.

“We just clicked. We have similar personalities and the way we approach music is very similar, very active,” she said. “We had similar views of our musical path.” Their plan for collaboration took off from there.

“We’re very excited for people to join us,” she said, of their three Bay Area performances (In addition to Mountain View, they also booked shows in Morgan Hill and San Francisco).

While Calderón Cornejo lives locally, Morales Torres is based in Texas, which means they’ve had a lot of Zoom meetings in preparation for the concert and planned an intense bout of in-person rehearsal before their run of Bay Area performances. 

“We have a lot of collaborative experience,” Calderón Cornejo said. “We’ve done a lot of that; we’ve talked a lot about how we’re going to do it, what pedals are going to work here; on paper it is great,” she said with a laugh, in the run-up to Morales Torres’ California arrival. 

Calderón Cornejo has been with CSMA for two years, teaching there four days a week, and has performed in past CSMA community concerts as well. She said CSMA’s mission of offering arts for all resonates strongly with her. 

“It’s especially for me very important because I’m Latina; you don’t see Latinas kind of in these spaces. It’s a systemic thing. It’s hard to find people who look like me and sound like me in these spaces,” she said. “I think it’s very important they give us the platform to be there.”

In that spirit, she said, it was also important to her and Morales Torres that all three of their Bay Area performances be offered to the community at no cost, bringing exposure to these lesser-known classical female composers from diverse cultural backgrounds and making the experience an accessible opportunity for as many folks as possible. 

“We need to bring this to people for free,” she said. “No matter where they come from, no matter where they live, they need to be able to access this.”

“Celebrating Women in Music,” Sat., March 16, 7:30 p.m., Tateuchi Hall, Community School of Music and Arts, 230 San Antonio Circle, Mountain View, free, arts4all.org/concerts/.