“The internationally renowned husband and wife piano duo of Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung wowed a full house Saturday night for the July 5th opening of the 56th Newport Classical Music Festival in the historic Breakers Mansion. After a brief welcome from Newport Classical Board President Susanna Laramee and Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee thanking Newport Classical for its year-round engagement reaching over 2,500 students through in-school workshops, free community concerts, and yearly commissions of new works from composers who are shaping the future of classical music, Bax and Chung took to the stage welcoming us with the delightful and exuberant finale of Mozart’s Concerto in F Major, K. 459 in the transcription titled Duettino concertante nach Mozart, BV B 88 of Ferruccio Busoni. Rather than merely reducing the orchestra part to a second piano, Busoni applied his creative genius and true affection for Mozart to the whole of the score, recasting the entire texture into a playful and imaginative dialogue between the two pianos, while respecting the integrity of the original concerto, with only sparse additions and interpolations. These took form as occasional sequenced extensions of episodic passages and small and subtle interpolations where Mozart himself may have added a small, embellished phrase (often marked by a fermata sign over a rest, called an ‘Eingang’).”
-Stephen Martorella, The Boston Musical Intelligencer
