Katia Labèque / Marielle Labèque AMORIA

The two Labèque sisters are Basque in origin, having been born on the southwest coast of France near the Spanish border. Katia and Marielle are a sharply contrasted, yet highly communicative piano team. While their joint reputation was won initially through the performance of unusual repertoire, they have not neglected traditional works for two pianos.

For this vibrant and colorful album, the Labèque sisters reconnect with their Basque roots to explore a fabulously varied program that roams over five centuries of music. Joined variously by singers, percussionists, and a viola da gamba player, they weave a wonderful tapestry of sounds that reaches a toe-tapping climax with “Boléro” by Maurice Ravel (also of Basque lineage). The Labèques’ awe-inspiring unanimity of playing again takes the breath away, but they also find a gentler, almost melancholy quality that’s very touching. Folk music and art music collide here and create something very modern yet strangely timeless.

Katia & Marielle Labèque LOVE STORIES

Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet inspired many composers from Benda to Prokofiev through Berlioz, Gounod or Tchaikowsky and it is always a challenge for a musician to approach such a subject so full of history. With Star-Cross’d Lovers French composer David Chalmin gives a new look at Shakespeare's drama : a contemporary ballet choreographed by Yaman Okur, written for two pianos, electric guitar, electronics and drums. The musical dramaturgy is based on tension and resolution, violence and harmony, brutality and poetry, which correspond to the two antagonist themes of hatred and love.
These contrasts enable a vast range of choreographic possibilities boosted by the energy exchanges between the seven breakdancers and the four musicians.
The piece is tinged with Minimalist, rock and electronics but also includes references to art music or ethnic music. It finds its unity in a cleverly combination of tradition and experimentalism.
The clashes between the two rival gangs take place in a dark, oppressive and threatening musical world where tension and danger are constant. It could describe a sordid urban environment, perhaps that of a soulless suburb of a big city. The tragic end of the work is prefigured in the first prologue by an evolving melodic theme played by the pianos in the lower register that could be a modern version of a Wagnerian leitmotiv of curse or fate.
Electronic roars and buzzes, howlings of electric guitar, aggressive hammerings of pianos, cold polyrhythmic combining motoric style, obssesive rave music but also african and latino influences, contribute to this dystopian vision of the drama.
The musical universe of the two famous lovers, which often tintinnabulate in the high register of the pianos, is instead full of delicacy and sweetness. David Chalmin gives his music a special charm drawing his inspiration from Ravelian limpidness, Schubertian lyricism and Chopinian poetry but also from styles close to jazz and pop music.
David Chalmin 30-minute score was composed for Katia and Marielle Labèque. It was premiered at the Philharmonie de Paris on May 2015. Since then, it has been performed in Luzern, Dortmund, Montpellier Festival, Bordeaux, Paris (Théâtre du Châtelet), Napoli Festival, etc...

West Side Story is probably Bernstein's masterpiece and unquestionably the best-known American work all over the world. Ever since the highly favorable critical and audience reception at New York's Winter Garner Theatre on Broadway, September 26, 1957, and the phenomenal success of Robert Wise's film adaptation in 1961, this contemporary urban version of Romeo and Juliet has never ceased to move spectators and fill them with enthusiasm.
Although West Side Story bears Bernstein's inimitable mark, it was born of collective work bringing together, amongst others, the choreographer and director Jerome Robbins, librettist Arthur Laurents, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and arrangers Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal.
It was Bernstein himself who asked Irwin Kostal to produce an arrangement for the duo-pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque. This suite of 17 pieces includes an assortment of dances and songs, which appear in a new light. Thanks to his perfect knowledge of the score, Kostal succeeds in giving his small ensemble an orchestral fullness. The seeming monochromy of the two pianos, far from making the music dull, allows us to appreciate a harmonic language that is simple yet quite subtle, in the service of the composer's enormous talents as a melodist. Deprived of the lyric dimension provided by the voices, the songs unfold their phrases with unsuspected naturalness and authenticity.

Katia & Marielle Labèque INVOCATIONS

Katia and Marielle Labèque are sibling pianists renowned for their ensemble of synchronicity and energy. Their musical ambitions started at an early age and they rose to international fame with their contemporary rendition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (one of the first gold records in classical music) and have since developed a stunning career with performances worldwide.

They are regular guests with the most prestigious orchestras such as the Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw, Berlin Philharmonic, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Filarmonia della Scala, Philadelphia Orchestra, Dresden Staatskapelle and Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Semyon Bychkov, Lionel Bringuier, Sir Colin Davis, Gustavo Dudamel, Charles Dutoit, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Kristjan Järvi, Paavo Järvi, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Antonio Pappano, Georges Prêtre, Sir Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson Thomas and Jaap van Zweden.

They have appeared with baroque music ensembles such as The English Baroque Soloists with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Il Giardino Armonico with Giovanni Antonini, Musica Antica with Reinhard Goebel and Venice Baroque with Andrea Marcon, il Pomo d’Oro and also toured with The Age of Enlightenment & Sir Simon Rattle.

Katia and Marielle have had the privilege of working with many composers including Thomas Adès, Louis Andriessen, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, György Ligeti and Olivier Messiaen. On the 26th May 2015 Katia and Marielle gave in Los Angeles at Walt Disney Hall the world premiere of Philip Glass’s new Concerto (written for them) together with Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel. A new concerto by Bryce Dessner, written specially for the piano duo, will be ready in 2018.

Katia & Marielle Labèque SISTERS

“Whether Mozart or Stravinsky, their musical line always sounds as if it’s being woven for the very first time... 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.” The Times

Katia and Marielle Labèque are sibling pianists renowned for their ensemble of synchronicity and energy. Their musical ambitions started at an early age and they rose to international fame with their contemporary rendition of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (one of the first gold records in classical music) and have since developed a stunning career with performances worldwide.

Katia and Marielle Labèque also launched the KML Foundation, aimed at furthering research and developing awareness of the duo piano repertoire through meetings between artists of all fields. One of the Foundation latest projects is a concert around Moondog's music, in collaboration with Kings Place in London, in continuity to their work on Minimalist composers.

In May 2015 the show Love Stories with the new piece Star-Cross'd Lovers by David Chalmin was premiered at the Paris Philharmonie. This original composition for two pianos, electric guitar and drums is based on the Shakespearean drama Romeo and Juliet. The choreography for 7 dancers is created by world-renowned break-dancer Yaman Okur (Madonna, Cirque du Soleil). The show was also presented in Paris in June 2016 at Chatelet, and the European tour will last until October 2016.

A record audience of more then 100.000 attended the Vienna Summer Night Concert 2016 in Schönbrunn (now available on CD and DVD by Sony), where Katia and Marielle played with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Semyon Bychkov. More then 1,5 Milliard viewer followed the event worldwide on the TV.

Labèque’s label KML Recordings joined in Summer 2016 the historical label Deutsche Grammophon. A 2 CDs re-edition of their album Minimalist Dream House follow their concert at the Philharmonie de Paris on the 25th of September together with the first recording of their project “Love Stories”.

Katia & Marielle Labèque MINIMALIST DREAM HOUSE

To be musically avant-garde in the 1950s meant to be difficult. Not by the end of the 1960s. That decade saw a group of American beatniks overthrow the musical givens of postwar Europe. In a series of disobediently straightforward compositions La Monte Young, Terry Jennings, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass declared that music could be clear, honest, pretty and experimental. Turning their backs on the conventional centres of musical power, the earliest minimalist works got their first public audience in La Monte Young's 1960-61 Chamber Street Series in Yoko Ono's New York loft. Through the 1960s in art galleries and alternative spaces, the minimalists slowly demystified, democratised and Americanised European modernism. They rejected the angst (what Philip Glass would call "crazy creepy music"). They rejected the invisible games. They rejected the theatricality. "I don't know any secrets of structure that you can't hear," wrote Steve Reich in his 1968 minimalist manifesto, Music as a Gradual Process. Minimalism claimed that there was enough interest in the sounding process itself and enough new territory to be explored in rhythmic patterning to sustain a work. If one removed the Baroque complications - the harmonic story-telling and thematic cleverness - that were obscuring the natural beauties of rhythm and sound, what would be revealed and discovered could provide classical music with a new lease of life. They were right. Minimalism was the last great musical revolution of the 20th century. And it became the most influential and successful ism of them all. In the spirit of the loft concerts we also present new works by David Chalmin, Raphael Seguinier.