Hallelujah Junction: Adams, Stravinsky, Gershwin & Copland

The husband-and-wife pianists Lukas Geniušas and Anna Geniushene both have thriving careers as soloists, and there’s an obvious synergy between them on their debut album as a duo. Playing on two pianos, they bring an infectious lilt and shimmer to the arrangement of George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture which opens the recital, and to Leonard Bernstein’s arrangement of Copland’s El Salón México. In Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, precisely etched syncopations fleck their performance of the playful “Allegretto”, while the pair whip up a storm together in Frederic Rzewski’s volcanic Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. The tintinnabulations of gamelan music ripple through Colin McPhee’s Balinese Ceremonial Music, where Geniušas and Geniushene bring a sense of joyful uplift to the “Taboeh Teloe” finale. Their seamlessly intermeshed playing pays particularly rich dividends in John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction, where the finale has all of the rhythmic exhilaration and “full-tilt boogie” which Adams intended.