'Dueling Pianos': Daughter to Pay Tribute to Ferrante & Teicher at EIU
Feb-06-2009
The work of Ferrante and Teicher, a piano duo that sold 88 million albums over four decades, will be celebrated in an upcoming Eastern Illinois University concert featuring Teicher's own daughter.
The concert, "Dueling Pianos," is set for 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 22, in the Dvorak Concert Hall, Doudna Fine Arts Center. Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for senior citizens and EIU employees, and $5 for students. Seating is reserved.
Louis Teicher and Arthur Ferrante had a number of hit songs in their long career, including the movie themes to "The Apartment," "Exodus" and "Midnight Cowboy."
Susan Teicher and Richard Robert Rossi, both EIU music faculty members, will perform two of Arthur Ferrante and Louis Teicher's two-piano arrangements, "Fiddler on the Roof" and "West Side Story." They will be accompanied by the Eastern Symphony Orchestra.
Also featured will be pianist Jeffrey Brown, who will perform Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Opus 18, one of the world's most popular piano concertos. Brown is director of keyboard studies at Christopher Newport University.
Louis Teicher died in August at the age of 83, and his daughter, who followed in his music-making footsteps, is looking forward to celebrating his extraordinary life with this performance.
"It's great fun to bring these arrangements for two pianos and orchestra back to the concert stage," Susan Teicher said. "Their music brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people, and it is a privilege for me to have the opportunity to perform it."
Ferrante and Teicher were nicknamed "The Grand Twins of the Twin Grands," and their showmanship and style -- including matching jackets, black-rimmed glasses and dark pompadours -- drew comparisons to Liberace.
The duo estimated they played 5,000 concerts, attended by 18 million people. Countless more welcomed the duo into their homes via television variety shows.
In their early days, the duo experimented with the inner workings of the piano to make different, strange sounds, but after joining United Artists in 1960, they adopted a more mainstream, easy-listening style, leading to their place as one of the best-selling instrumental easy-listening groups of the decade.
The "Dueling Pianos" concert is sponsored by the Charleston Area Charitable Foundation, Eastern Symphony Orchestra sponsors and the EIU music department.
For tickets and information, or to arrange accommodations for persons with special needs, contact Doudna Fine Arts Patron Services (217-581-3110 or doudnatix@eiu.edu) or visit the Doudna Fine Arts Center Box Office.
The Doudna is located one block west of Ninth Street at Garfield Avenue on the EIU campus. Free parking is available in the any of the university lots at the corner of Ninth and Garfield and immediately south of the center. The Doudna Fine Arts Center is a division of the EIU College of Arts and Humanities. For more information, please see http://www.eiu.edu/doudna.
