Piano 4 Hands open this year’s Festival with a piano duet recital featuring a new work by John McCabe, commissioned and premièred by the duo in 2009, flanked by two masterpieces for four hands by Mozart and Ravel.  John McCabe refers to ‘the specific trigger for the piece [being] the Rothko Exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008’ where, according to the composer, ‘I felt strongly this sense of being drawn into the inner life of the painting’. The F major Sonata is a sparkling work and one of Mozart’s crowning achievements (written in the same year as The Marriage of Figaro) whilst Ravel’s La Valse was famously described by the composer as ‘the mad whirl of some fantastic and fateful carousel’.

Widely regarded as one of Britain’s leading piano duos, Piano 4 Hands are regular performers at London’s Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and Fairfield Halls. Joseph Tong and Waka Hasegawa were prize winners at the 2003 Tokyo International Piano Duo Competition and at the Schubert International Competition in the Czech Republic. The duo has given recitals in Japan, Germany, the USA, Italy and Spain as well as broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and WFMT Radio in Chicago.

Piano 4 Hands have played at the Cheltenham Music Festival as well as the Chichester, Bury St Edmunds and Guildford Festivals amongst others and at major venues such as St David’s Hall Cardiff, The Lighthouse Poole and Bridgewater Hall, Manchester.

Their debut CD of Debussy piano duets for Quartz was Album of the Week in The Independent and their disc of Schubert duets on the same label received similar critical acclaim; a recording of works for piano duo, duet and solo piano by John McCabe is due for release this year.

Joseph Tong and Waka Hasegawa were elected Associates of the Royal Academy of Music in 2008.

Concert to be followed by a MasterBlast Workshop starting at 2.15pm

A mouth-watering lunchtime programme for two pianos performed by the acclaimed British duo of Simon Crawford-Phillips and Philip Moore. The two-piano medium is one that has entranced composers for several centuries and it has proved an irresistible one when it comes to paring an orchestral score down to the essential. You might expect a work like Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune to lose colour and impact when translated to the world of the piano but the fascinating aspect is what’s gained in the process; very often the inner rhythms and the interplay of the musical lines becomes more sharply focused as a result. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances was his last major work and is a virtual symphony in three movements, which the composer transcribed for two pianos at the same time as writing the orchestral version. A virtuoso tour de force, Lutoslawski’s brilliant Paganini Variations were used by the composer and Andrzej Panufnik to entertain café audiences when public concerts were banned in Nazi-occupied Poland and hilariously sends up Paganini’s most famous theme.

Simon Crawford-Phillips and Philip Moore occupy a unique place amongst piano duos: they are established chamber musicians in their own right, with flourishing independent international careers; yet since 1995 have devoted several thousands of hours to this most exacting of disciplines, giving them extraordinary musical empathy. The Duo were selected for representation by Young Concert Artists Trust in London from 2001 to 2006, and their contribution to the profession was recognised through a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2004.

They have performed and broadcast in many countries, recent tours taking them to Washington, Amsterdam, Perugia and Hanover; and at the major UK festivals and venues, including the Barbican, the South Bank, Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall and Usher Hall, and Glasgow’s City Halls.

Regular performers on BBC Radio 3, they made their Proms debut in 2001, and have recorded for Naxos and Deux-Elles to critical acclaim. They have given world premieres of Detlev Glanert’s Two Piano Concerto with the BBCSSO/Martyn Brabbins and, at the 2009 BBC Proms, Anna Meredith’s Two Piano Concerto with Britten Sinfonia/Ludovic Morlot. In 2012 they will make their debut with the Hallé, under Edward Gardner.

Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips are Steinway Artists and Associates of the Royal Academy of Music.

Make a note in your diary for what will be an exciting new strand to this year’s Festival, as we welcome two brilliant jazz pianists. John Law has appeared regularly at St George’s and is already a firm favourite with Bristol audiences. Gwilym Simcock performed at Colston Hall in June with ‘The Impossible Gentlemen’ and has taken the jazz world by storm over recent years, attracting rave reviews in the UK and abroad.

Creative sparks are guaranteed to fly between two such distinctive and inspirational pianists - their performance at St George’s promises to be one of this year's hot tickets.

John Law, a prize-winning classical prodigy on piano, turned away from classical piano studies to pursue jazz and improvised music when he was 23.  He has received international acclaim and recognition for his work in a wide variety of jazz as well as modern classical projects. John Law’s discography includes solo piano albums based on plainchant, encompasses trio and quartet work covering the whole spectrum from freely improvised music to jazz standards and works by Thelonious Monk, right through to composing large scale works for his semi-classical ensemble Cornucopia. His main current project is the acclaimed trio The Art of Sound, with Yuri Goloubev/Tom Farmer and Asaf Sirkis.

John Law has played at over fifty festivals worldwide and recorded more than twenty-five albums, working with musicians as diverse as Andy Sheppard, Tim Garland and Evan Parker.

Gwilym Simcock, BBC Radio 3 Jazz Award winner and first ever BBC Radio 3 New Generations Jazz Artist, has been described as a ‘jazzier’ John Taylor, his style reminiscent of Keith Jarrett. His ‘harmonic sophistication and subtle dovetailing of musical traditions’ make him stand out as one of the most gifted performers and imaginative composers working on the British scene. Able to move effortlessly through jazz and classical he can at times inhabit both worlds. The music is engaging, exciting, often unexpected, melodically enthralling, complex and wonderfully optimistic.

Step back in time to Vienna, 1917, where Charles Hazlewood and his orchestra invite you to join them at one of the legendary private performance evenings organized by Schoenberg and the glitterati of musical society.  Set aside your prejudice of Schoenberg as being a composer of only very serious music and witness what happens as the great Austrian lets his hair down, leaving his serialism at home and arranging a series of pieces by some of the greatest composers of all time!  Be swept away by exquisite arrangements of dance-king Strauss’s ‘Emperor’ and ‘Treasure’ waltzes and pleasure seeking ‘Wine, Women & Song’, enraptured by Mahler’s almost unbearably sad Songs of a Wayfarer, and enthralled by the thrilling four-hands piano arrangements of some of Schubert’s most accomplished orchestral music, for the play Rosamunde.    The arrangements are sparkling, witty and hugely resourceful, the performances given by some of the country’s finest musicians – a fitting climax to Charles Hazlewood’s adventures through the theme of Refractions & Abstractions.

To round off this year’s Festival in true style, an unmissable evening of piano comedy with the hilarious and ridiculously talented double act previously known as Katzenjammer.

Even though Steven Worbey and Kevin Farrell had known each other since they were teenagers and studied together at the Royal College of Music, it was an improvised and slightly drunken afternoon at the piano that lead them teaming up to become one of the world’s most entertaining and certainly unique, piano-comedy double-acts. Although pursuing separate careers performing and writing (and in Steven’s case, acting), from 2003 they met every week for a year or so and the act slowly came together, fusing their personalities as well as their considerable technical and writing skills. As Steven reflects: “It just clicked - the humour, the synchronisation, the improvised sense of fun. We discovered that we played the piano together in a way that had never been played before”. Kevin adds: “It seemed, looking back, like we were an accident waiting to happen”. Their first gig (by accident, naturally) was at The Royal Opera House, which lead to a flood of offers across the world. Their mix of live comedy, breathtaking cabaret and musical virtuosity (“you get four hands for the price of two”) has made them a global hit and gained them a dedicated following. From Papa New Guinea to Berwick Upon Tweed (“literally on consecutive nights”) they have performed in 138 countries and show no signs of slowing up.

Worbey and Farrell appeared at the Isle of Man Festival this summer and they are currently developing a new stage show for Edinburgh 2011.