At the end of Greg Anderson’s arrangement of Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance,” Alexis Zou, a Lake Oswego High School sophomore, has to make a complicated maneuver.
Zou sits to the right of Hansen Berrett on an extra-long piano bench. At the end of “Sabre Dance,” Zou spins and reaches around for the opposite end of the keyboard while Berrett slides his hand up the piano for a glissando before she hits a final low note to end the piece.
Zou and Berrett, a West Linn High School junior, won the Music Teachers National Association Senior Competition for Piano Duet, becoming the first Oregonians to win both the Northwest region and the national competition. This is their second year competing in the MTNA competitions after they placed second at regionals last year.
“It takes a lot of energy to not fall off the bench,” said Zou, laughing. “I think going into it (nationals) I thought it’d be something really formal and really scary — everybody from all over the U.S. is there, so many esteemed piano professors and other professors would be there watching us. I went in feeling really nervous but actually being there, everybody was so friendly.”
Learning to collaborate
Piano duet, or piano four-hands, features two players on the same instrument, one playing the melody on the higher end of the piano, the primo, while the other lays the foundation on the low end, the secondo.
“Each has their own role by themselves,” said Berrett. “There’s kind of three scores you need to learn: your individual scores, that’s two, and the collaborative one where you have to figure out, ‘How should we coordinate together?’”
Berrett and Zou started playing as a duet because they shared a private piano teacher.he question of whose idea it was in the first place remains a mystery.
“I remember at the time, I felt pretty nervous. I think it’s hard to make the change from playing solo and then to go play duet,” said Zou. “You think from a larger perspective and a larger point of view. Now that we’re done with nationals I honestly feel grateful for this experience. It’s taught me a lot about how I want to collaborate with other people and how I want to communicate my opinions and thoughts.I think it’s a really valuable experience.”
Berrett said duet forces pianists to learn to collaborate because they’re so used to working alone.
“You really have to learn to compromise and make concessions,” said Berrett. “I’ve really come to respect Alexis’s opinions and interpretations because I’m, let’s say, a very explorative person, and Alexis is very good at telling me when I do something way too crazy. There's that natural exchange of ideas that is extremely beneficial and has helped me grow as a musician.”
Rarified air
Their collaboration and growth as young musicians carried them all the way to Atlanta for the MTNA Senior competition. As the Northwest regional winners, they competed against six other piano duet pairs at the competition.
“We were the last group to perform at nationals, so the people that competed before us stayed back and watched us perform,” said Zou.
Berrett and Zou performed five songs during the competition, going from their first piece, the Baroque “Ballet, from Orphee et Eurydice” by Christoph Gluck, to their final piece “Sabre Dance.” In between, they performed pieces by Beethoven, Saint-Saens and Kapustin.
After practicing their repertoire for more than two years, the teenagers said that they can communicate while playing in very subtle ways.
“A lot of that communication is intuitive; we’ve just figured it out,” said Berrett.
When they heard they’d won regionals, they immediately called each other.
“My mom texted me and I remember being so excited I called Hansen in the middle of class,” said Zou.
After securing their place as the first Oregonian pair to both qualify and win nationals, they’re unsure if they’ll compete again. Music, however, is certainly in their futures.
“Music is such an important piece of my life that it's hard to imagine the future going without it,” said Zou.
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