The Two Pianos "Backstory" introduces the Levins' intercontinental quest to recapture vanished worlds, how Two Pianos came to be, and the characters' eventful lives.
The Piano Duo Stanislava Varshavski and Diana Shapiro lead off explaining their specialty -- concerts on two paired pianos or with four hands at one piano. The program begins with their transcribed rendition of the "Russian Dance" from Stravinsky's Petroushka, and ends with Felix Mendelssohn's Andante and Allegro Brilliante. This music has intimate connections to Anna's family and Leipzig's cultural history. Anna's older sister Rebecca Burstein-Arber (1894-1993) played the Russian premiere of Petroushka at Petrograd's Mariinski Theatre (1920). Mendelssohn, a:Leipzig legend, was organizer and first conductor of Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and founding director of the Leipzig Conservatory. He wrote the piece above for two equally legendary Leipzigers, pianist Clara (Wieck) Schumann and her husband-to-be Robert Schumann, and premiered it in Leipzig with Clara (1841). Anna's family connections to the Leipzig Conservatory date to 1908 when her father, bassoonist Jacob Burstein. brought his oldest daughter Bertha (1891-1987) from Tsarist Kishinev to study piano at the Conservatory, followed by his trip to bring Rebecca the next year.
The "Backstory" outlines Anna's first return to Leipzig with Hirsch (1978) after they fled the Third Reich in 1936, including how that visit transformed the Levins' lives. It summarizes Hirsch's entrepreneurial rise (see A Border Town in Poland); Anna's pre-Conservatory paths in Bessarabia/Romania and British Mandate Palestine; and their courtship, marriage and flight to safety. Ken
Hoffman describes his emotional involvement after the Levins
reached out to share their 1980 interviews with his
grandmother Halina. Those passages recount Halina's fiery appearance in Leipzig, equally fiery
marriage to Jakob (Kuba) Schulsinger, and post-1938 Holocaust experiences before reaching America (1951). Growing up, Ken had heard only "little hints" of these stories. Their contents represented a "special conclusion" for him.
As the Levins conduct their interviews and begin to assemble these oral histories, "We realize we have a much bigger story than a
family’s. The events Hirsch, Anna and
their friends lived through and reacted to shaped the 20th
century. They are vivid witnesses to and actors in
those events."
