Lucas and Arthur Jussen, the amazing young Dutch duo pianists, returned to The Conrad Thursday with their dazzling pyrotechnics and nonpareil charm. Their program for the La Jolla Music Society traversed the piano repertory from Mozart to Rachmaninoff and included a 2022 work by the prolific German composer Jörg Widmann. The sonic might of two concert grand pianos can be formidable, and while the Jussen duo is not afraid to exploit these possibilities, what wins over their audience is their buoyant sound, sumptuous phrasing, and riveting synchronicity of articulation.
Raised in a musical family, the Jussen brothers started piano lessons early, and their teacher, Portuguese concert pianist Maria João Pires, suggested they form a duo piano team. Impressive performances by the brothers’ duo landed them a recording contract from Deutsche Grammophone while they were still teenagers.
Thursday’s program opened with Mozart’s Sonata in C Major for Piano Four-Hands, K. 521. This late work, completed while the composer was working on Don Giovanni, is a brilliant showpiece filled with demanding counterpoint, a testament to the young Mozart’s thorough study of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The Jussen’s ebullient account of the Sonata, especially their merciless drive and vibrant articulation, set up a template that defined the entire program.
Robert Schumann’s Andante and Variations for Two Pianos, Op. 46, is rarely encountered, but it delivers what we have come to expect from this manic depressive composer. His dreamy “Andante” quickly develops into a rhapsodic avalanche of wildly contrasting but connected forays that the brothers’ offered with athletic verve and evident delight at the composer’s audacious reversals.
I think it is safe to say the the music of Jörg Widmann is better know in Europe than in North America, so it was revelatory to hear his Bunte Blätter for Two Pianos. Widemann’s title is a riff on Robert Schumann’s 1852 album of short piano works under the title Bunte Blätter (“Brightly colored leaves”). This title may be a bit puzzling to San Diego natives, but in climates with actual winters, when the temperature drops in autumn, leaves from the deciduous trees turn red, yellow, or brown and fall to the ground where they are often collected for their bright hues and curious shapes.
For both composers, the title Bunte Blätter suggests an amusing collection of contrasting, unrelated movements without the strict organization of sonata or theme and variation forms. Widmann’s programmatic titles of the movements, e.g. “Waltz,” “Dance Macabre,” “Game of Tag,” and “Circus Parade,” suggests his playful edge, and his angular, modernist musical style proved surprisingly light on dissonance. I heard the influence of several 20th-century composers in Widmann’s work, especially the intricate canons of the late Conlon Nancarrow. The Jussen brothers’ technical flash made these bravura movements even more audience friendly, a definite advantage when offering new music to the public.
Claude Debussy’s wrote Six Épigraphes Antiques for four-hand piano in 1914 after he published his two books of definitive piano preludes, and the Six Épigraphes display the transparent but often deceptively complex textures of the preludes. Given the flamboyance of most of the Jusson’s programming and playing, this Debussy work demonstrated their ability to savor the subtle emotional soundscapes of “For a Tomb Without Name,” and “That the Night Might Be Propitious,” two of its more mysterious movements. And its final movement “To Thank the Morning Rain” is total understatement. It whispers throughout in that rare dynamic range of “piano” to “pianissimo,” save for one measure of “mezzo forte” in the secondo part, and the brothers captured its transcendence.
Although the duo played an encore, “Strausseinander” by Igor Roma, their final offering, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos, Opus 17, was really their generously scaled programm encore. Heroically proportioned and filled with the composer’s trademark lush, arching melodies, the Suite aspires to be a complete symphony, and the Jussen brothers gave it the muscular grandeur it requires. I feel that going to the Symphony this weekend will prove anticlimactic.
This program was presented on January 22, 2026, by the La Jolla Music Society at The Conrad in Downton La Jolla.