Gary Steigerwalt and Dana Muller play piano four hands

On Saturday, May 19 and Sunday, May 20, "For the Love of Music" presents Gary Steigerwalt and Dana Muller playing piano four hands on the Bisbee Women's Club historic Chickering piano. They have performed in Bisbee on numerous occasions to great acclaim, but this is their first appearance here since 2004.

The team, exciting to watch as well as to listen to, will play Maurice Ravel's "Rapsodie Espagnole", works by both Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, as well as pieces by Joseph Jonget and Ferruccio Busoni.

The concerts will be held at the Bisbee Woman's Club, 7 Ledge Avenue, Quality Hill, Old Bisbee. The Saturday concert will be at 8 pm and the sunday concert will be at 3 pm. Tickets cost $10 for adults and are available at the door half an hour before the performance. Students through high school will be admitted free. For further information please call 520 432 7217.

Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt have been performing the four-hand piano repertoire for over twenty years, creating programs that encompass the historical and stylistic gamut of the genre. They have performed extensively in the North, South, East and West of the U.S., as well as in Scotland, Argentina and Bolivia.

Their recording of four-hand works by early twentieth-century European composers (Centaur CD 2127) was hailed an outstanding disc by Fanfare. The disc includes La Valse by Maurice Ravel, Paul Hindemith?s Sonata, the complete four-hand works of Alfredo Casella, and collections of shorter pieces by Georges Auric, Arnold Schönberg, and Ferrucio Busoni. Also released by Centaur are a disc of nineteenth-century Romantic compositions by Anton Rubinstein, Josef Rheinberger and Frederick Shepherd Converse (CRC 2390) and Volumes I (CRC 2272) and II (CRC 2305) of a series of compact discs devoted to the four-hand works of Franz Schubert. Excerpts from their two Schubert discs can be heard in the critically acclaimed movie Good Will Hunting.

They presented the complete 4-hand works of Beethoven at the Beethoven Festival, Oyster Bay, L.I., and have appeared as 4-hand recitalists at summer festivals including the Bethlehem Musikfest (PA), Music at Penn Alps (MD), the Sevenars Festival and Musicorda Festival (MA). Orchestral appearances include the Pennsylvania Sinfonia (North American premiere of Jan Mul?s Concerto for Piano Four-Hands and Chamber Orchestra), and solo concertos with Orchestra New England.

In addition to performing recital programs, Muller and Steigerwalt appear at schools, universities and before music teachers? organizations, offering workshops, master classes and lecture-recitals. For the past several summers they have written the program notes and presented pre-concert lectures for the Musicorda Festival in Massachusetts. The husband-wife team resides in South Hadley, Massachusetts where Dr. Steigerwalt is a Professor on the music faculty of Mount Holyoke College.