Anderson & Roe – Program Notes

Season Listing | Biography | Program | Program Notes

Pianists Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe have chosen a program for Saturday, April 7, 2018’s Brown County Civic Music concert that includes many of the pieces they performed at their Kennedy Center debut in February.

Highlights of that critically acclaimed performance included the duo’s self-penned “Hallalujah Variations,” which will be the third selection of the program. Based on the famous theme by the late Leonard Cohen, the Anderson and Roe variation sets the tender melody against an intricate backdrop of harmonics and countermelodies.

In “Hallelujah Junction,” a 1996 composition for two pianos by American composer John Adams (a composition unrelated to the more famous Cohen music), the artists combine for a rhythmic soundscape, creating an effect of echoing sonorities.

Concluding the first half of the concert will be an Anderson and Roe interpretation of the Beatles’ classic “Let it Be,” with a take that has been described as bringing out jazz or gospel undertones of the melody.

The duo resumes after intermission with the moving, spirited and crowd-pleasing music of Leonard Bernstein’s “America.”

One of opera’s most beloved masterpieces, the elegant and emotional Ballet from Orphée et Eurydice, by the 18th century composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, will follow.  Closing the program is more opera-inspired music, this time with Anderson & Roe’s treatment of Georges Bizet’s masterwork, with “Carmen Fantasy for Two Pianos.”