One thing that immediately stands out when looking at the programme “55” that you are performing at the Opera is the presence of a large number of women composers. Is this something new for you?

K. L.: Yes, absolutely. For the most part, these are pieces we had never performed before. All of these women composers led deeply dramatic lives, marked by struggle. Fanny Mendelssohn, for example, was prevented from performing by her brother and father and was unable to publish her own works. When you are a woman composer and receive a letter from your father telling you that your true vocation is to look after your home, it is outrageous. Margaret Bonds faced the same difficulties – and even greater ones, because she was Black, and at that time [in mid-20th-century America], a Black woman could not become a classical pianist or composer. Nina Simone too, who said that she made “Black classical music”. Her version of Wild Is the Wind clearly reflects this lineage, with all its arpeggios that recall Liszt and Chopin.

M. L.: Grażyna Bacewicz, for her part, truly changed the course of music in Poland and inspired fellow Polish composers such as Lutosławski and Penderecki. But at times, she had to shut herself away somewhere else in order to work, because she could not do so at home. With this programme, we wanted to pay tribute to all these stories, so intense and so distinctive. These were voices that had hardly been heard at all. They wrote music in their own way. It moves us, and that is precisely what we strive to do as performers: to champion the music that moves us.

A number of the pieces you perform are arrangements or transcriptions of works originally written for solo piano.

M. L.: Yes, it is quite new for us to perform solo piano pieces as piano four hands or on two pianos. What interests us in this approach is offering a new perspective on the work. It does not work particularly well with virtuoso pieces; on the contrary, pieces featuring intertwining melodies or distinct musical “roles” provide a very interesting basis for this kind of work.

K. L.: For example, Dutilleux’s adaptation transforms Debussy’s Clair de lune into a moonlit scene that is no longer experienced alone, but together. As a general rule, we did not make the arrangements ourselves; we preferred to work with people who have genuine expertise in this field, such as Michael Blasky, for example.

You mentioned virtuosity: although it is present, for example, in Bacewicz (Étude No. 4) and Bernstein (particularly in Tonight), a number of the pieces you have chosen for this recital explore a different path, one that is more intimate, more expressive, so to speak.

K. L.: That’s true. For example, the piece by Marie Jaëll – to whom Liszt once said, “If you had a man’s name, your scores would be on every piano in the world” – that we chose is one of the least virtuosic. It is a very slow and very beautiful waltz.

M. L.: Also, one of our favourite works of all time, if you will, is Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye, and it begins with four notes. There are works we have grown somewhat tired of over the course of our 55-year career, but never this one. It seems very simple because its difficulties are not immediately apparent: balancing the dynamics, shaping the phrasing, managing to sing while shifting ever so slightly, as a singer would. When we were young, we played fast and loud; as the years have gone by, we have come to enjoy finding beauty in a simple melody.

Is it a matter of removing the “extra” notes, as Brahms and Ravel used to say?

K. L.: Yes, there is something to that. It brings to mind Novecento by the great Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. Novecento is a pianist who never gets off the ship he is on, and what he seeks is to play all the notes in the world in a single note. It is beautiful. But unlike Novecento, our desire is to remain open to what is happening around us. This is something that has guided us since the beginning of our career.