Beethoven's 9th Symphony
Transcribed for 2 Pianos by Franz Liszt

Music in London - Beethoven's 9th Symphony Played on Two Pianos
The Contiguglias sustained and fulfilled the mighty architectural plan of the piece.  It was a tremendous accomplishment, and earned the cheers with which it was rewarded.   - International Herald Tribune

The Contiguglias are first-rate pianists and interpreters, and they bring a particularly poetic style to the epic music that makes it sound poignantly humane.  - The New York Times

The Contiguglia Brothers play superbly.  You can hear facets of the 9th Symphony than no public performance with huge chorus, red-faced soloists and thundering orchestra will ever give you.  - The Washington Post

Richard and John Contiguglia whipped up unabashedly romantic masses of sound at their facing keyboards, octaves, arpeggios, block chords, mercurial scales.  Liszt used virtually everything in his sizable arsenal at various junctures of this piece.  For listeners, the joy of this piece extends beyond the pianistic fireworks, which are certainly entertaining in themselves.  Rather, it offers a chance to watch Liszt at work, to observe precisely what he does with another composer's masterwork.  - Chicago Tribune

The Contiguglias managed to bring out the rhythmic profile of the piece that is usually obscured in orchestral performance.  The thematic development, the modulations, especially in the 4th movement, came together naturally in this exciting piano interpretation.  Seventy minutes of music without a sense of boredom.  - Trou, Holland

Their Beethoven No. 9 caused a sensation in Japan.  They are very different from all other duo-pianists I have heard.  They bring the duo-piano art out of the salon and into today's large concert halls with their dynamic, articulated and detailed playing.  - Stereo Gaijutsu, Tokyo, Japan

Here is a 'tour de force' indeed.  Beethoven's towering Ninth Symphony, the most influential work of its age, and the most difficult, memorably transcribed for the keyboard by the most gifted pianist-composer of the succeeding generation.  The achievement is fairly astounding.  "It sounds glorious," wrote Clara Schumann, after playing through the arrangement with Brahms on his 22nd birthday.  The performance by Richard and John Contiguglia is superb, utterly sure technically, extraordinarily authoritative in terms of tempo and phrasing.  "Glorious," as Clara Schumann rightly affirmed.  - Gramaphone

This must be quite the most astonishing record (Beethoven-Liszt 9th Symphony) of the year, not to say the most brilliant.  The Contiguglias must now surely rank as one of the world's most formidable duo teams.  In some respects, indeed, I have never heard better, and am frankly dumbfounded by much of what they have achieved.  It seems they have given the two-piano medium a whole new dimension.  ---  It was the Contiguglias who gave what appears to have been the first public performance of Liszt's amazing and terrifyingly difficult two-piano reduction of Beethoven's 9th in London.  It is a phenomenal arrangement, published in 1852, and in scope quite without precedent. ---  Interpretatively, the Contiguglia's grasp of the work is titanically symphonic.  The tension is never allowed to sag, the momentum is Herculean, the pace as well maintained as in the finest orchestral performance.  - Records and Recording

In a New York Times interview Vladamir Horowitz called Liszt's piano transcriptions of the Beethoven Symphonies "the greatest works for the piano."

Richard and John Contiguglia consider the Beethoven-Liszt 9th Symphony the greatest work ever written for two pianos.

Duo-Pianists Richard and John Contiguglia
Contact E-mail: rcontiguglia@nyc.rr.com
Tel: (212) 724-3972
Tel/Fax: (212) 874-7227

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