The Unison Piano Duo has played everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the Czech Vysocina Music Festival. But despite its travels, the husband and wife team cites Luther College in Decorah, Iowa — where both members are faculty — as its performance venue of choice.
“For me personally, the recital hall at Luther is always a very special home base,” Unison Piano Duo member Du Huang said. “The students, staff, and residents know our concerts, and they really pack the hall in a way that is very rewarding for us.”
The Unison Piano Duo — made up of Du Huang and Xiao Hu — will perform at the University Capitol Centre’s Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. The duo will perform pieces by composers ranging from Igor Stravinsky to UI Associate Professor of composition and theory Michael Eckert.
The concert is sponsored by the UI Center for New Music.
Both Huang and Hu began playing the piano at a young age — 6 and 5 — and they have been hooked ever since. They met in high school and attended the prestigious University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music together, receiving both their bachelors’ and masters’ there.
Hu said she and her husband started playing together at music festivals during graduate school in 1997.
“It wasn’t serious at all until we went for our doctorate degrees at the State University of New York-Stony Brook,” she said.
Hu and Huang are partially responsible for Saturday’s concert. The duo placed an ad in the “Iowa Composers Forum Newsletter” calling for original scores written for two separate pianos or four hands on one piano. Members from the forum submitted “a lot of original scores,” Huang said.
“We selected scores that we liked, and we created a concert tour,” Huang said.
Saturday’s show is the first stop on that tour. Eckert saw the pair’s ad and contacted them about performing one of the concerts at the UI. One of Eckert’s own compositions will be performed along with works from various other Iowa natives and professors. One of the duo’s Luther College colleagues, Brooke Joyce, also has a piece in the concert written specifically for Unison.
After attending a concert at New York City’s Carnegie Hall composed entirely by college professors, the two decided they would like to perform at the same concert the following year.
“We thought, what a great concert,” Huang said. “We wanted to feature a new composition at it. We asked [Joyce] to compose a piece, and we did the world première at Carnegie Hall.”
Saturday’s concert will offer the audience an opportunity to experience a less-traditional form of chamber music.
“There is a large volume of repertoire devoted to [piano duets],” Huang said. “There is a lot of music for both types — for four hands on one piano and two pianos. Yes, the piano duo is kind of a rarity, but there are competitions for it, and professionals and students have all made their lives very meaningful pursuing this kind of repertoire.”