Couple’s harmonious sound starts in separate places

The Spokane Symphony opens its 2014-15 season this weekend, and the orchestra, along with conductor Eckart Preu, will be joined by the duo of Gil Garburg and Sivan Silver. The internationally acclaimed pianists will perform two pieces together – Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Two Pianos in E Major and J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos in C.

Silver and Garburg, both Israelis, aren’t just musical partners; they’re also married and have a 4-year-old son. Garburg answered some of our questions about the couple’s musical backgrounds, the challenge of balancing work with family and how he and his wife individually interpret the same material.

SR: When did you each begin playing music?

Gil Garburg: Sivan was a real wunderkind. (She had) played with an orchestra already at the age of 4, and at a live program on national radio at 5. I started much later, at the age of 10.

SR: How did you meet, and when did you start performing together?

Garburg: We first met at music high school, the only one in Israel at the time. At the end of high school, we both won the concerto competition, so we played the same concerto – but not together – with the orchestra. We became a couple at (Tel Aviv University) and started playing together in Hanover, where we studied for our final degrees. We started with one program for one concert … but we had so many concerts together that we found ourselves playing all the time as a duo.

SR: Are there any challenges in raising a family and juggling it with your busy performing schedules?

Garburg: Our son is now 4 years old, and we are very lucky to be able to travel with him everywhere – three weeks ago we were still in Australia. Though it requires a lot of thought and effort, it makes life so much richer that we wouldn’t miss it for the world. Naturally, he will go to Spokane with us.

SR: What are your relationships to the pieces you’ll be performing with the symphony?

Garburg: We play two different pieces that have many strong ties between them. The Bach Concerto in C major is a true masterpiece – three movements, each of them completely different and each of them great. … Mendelssohn wrote his concerto in E major very young. This concerto just makes us feel so happy. It is fantastic music and so virtuosic. Amazing that Mendelssohn could actually play it when he was 14; what a pianist he must have been.

SR: What are the differences between performing alone and performing together, in terms of communicating your feelings through the music?

Garburg: For us, there is no big difference. … When we have played and developed the work together for many, many hours, we come to the point where each of us can anticipate and know exactly what the other will play. It is like being a magical being with four hands. Though the other two hands are not physically connected to our body, they still do exactly as each of us want.

SR: Do you often find yourself interpreting the same piece differently, or do your sensibilities tend to line up?

Garburg: We often start our process from very different places. This is one of the fascinating things about playing together, though it takes many hours of hard work. We don’t seek to actually play the same but … to hear the same colors and development in harmony in the same way.