Three people, two pianos and one house
Thirty fingers and two pianos captivated the audience in an elegant setting recently.
Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saëns and Arnold van Wyk were performed and left the audience wanting more.
The first ten fingers belonged to Theresa Prinsloo, who started piano lessons at the age of four with her mother. She has won numerous awards, medals and bursaries at school.
She has also appeared several times as a soloist with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra and has completed a BMus degree at the University of Pretoria.
The second 10 fingers on the piano were Janette Rottcher’s, who started playing piano at the age of three under her mother’s guidance.
She also started her violin career at the age of six.
At the age of five she performed as a pianist at the Rustenburg Arts Festival.
She took part in various competitions and earned two degrees, a BMus and MMus. She is currently a music teacher at Uplands College in White River.
Playing the second piano part was Tobias Kruger, who studied in Mbombela under Rita Riekert and in Pretoria under the tutelage of Ella Fourie and Wim Viljoen.
Kruger returned from Pretoria in 2010 and, since then, has not only starred as a soloist with the Lowveld Chamber Music Association, but has also accompanied several international vocalists at recitals to huge acclaim.
He has accompanied tenor Walter Fourie in an Afrikaans art-song recital in the United States.
Prinsloo and Rottcher played the Sonata For Two Pianos K 448 by Mozart, one of the few works written for two pianos.
They also played Fanz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, that had originally been written for solo piano, but was rearranged for two.
The thirty fingers all came into play when the three pianists played Camille Saints-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. Saints-Saëns wrote this after his German tour had been unsuccessful and he was recouping in a small town in Austria. It was originally scored for an orchestra and was only published posthumously.
Three improvisations on Dutch folk songs played by Arnold van Wyk, were played by all three pianists. The works have a link to Africa. The three songs were “To the Market”, “Prayer for the Homeland” and “The Silver Fleet”.
