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Lucas and Arthur Jussen Join Susanna Mälkki and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the World Premiere of Andrew Norman's Split for Two Pianos and Orchestra

Apr. 20, 2026

Under the baton of Susanna Mälkki, The Jussen Brothers and the Boston Symphony Orchestra presented the world premiere performances of Andrew Norman's Split for two pianos and orchestra on April 16-18 at Boston Symphony Hall. In his program notes, writer Robert Kirzinger observes:

"For those of us who have encountered many artistic origin stories, the history of Andrew Norman’s Split for two pianos and orchestra instantly recalls that of Johannes Brahms’s D minor Piano Concerto. That comparison is usefully borne out by Norman’s own comments on his piece. The practice, or habit, of returning to and rewriting a piece is hardly uncommon, sometimes — as in Norman’s case — amounting to an aesthetic stance. Split may be his most extreme case.

After developing the musical ideas for Split in versions for solo piano and piano duo, Norman wrote the first publicly performed version of Split, which he called a fantasia for piano and orchestra, on commission from the New York Philharmonic for the conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane, with whom the composer had worked on a project for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. As he was embarking on the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra commission for a new piece for two pianos and orchestra, he realized he couldn’t escape the abandoned two-piano version of Split from more than a decade earlier and felt compelled to bring it to fruition.

Norman met with the Jussen brothers at the beginning of the process of writing the piece, more to get to know their personalities than to discuss technique or mechanics. They gave him as much expressive freedom as he could wish for. Particularly tailored to the Jussens’ performance style are passages that exploit their preternatural ability to blend in perfect synchrony. In the piece, the composer also poses the rhetorical question of whether the two parts are to be considered one consciousness or two, a single entity that has somehow split, or even two opposed forces.

These ideas relate to the social media and technological metaphors that underlie Norman’s concept for Split. While he was careful to create musical ideas that are clear in themselves—akin, say, to a single reel on Instagram or a brief snippet of video on YouTube—he combines and reorders them to suggest the destabilizing “rabbit hole” effect of chasing the next tweet or random/targeted link. Individual moments may be enlightening or witty, he says, but “there’s a price to pay” for each coil of the spiral. Even so, as a composer, Norman is ultimately interested in creating a cohesive musical experience, aiming for the same qualities of expectation, fulfillment, and surprise that make for a satisfying listening experience. A piece that’s maximally energetic for its entire span exhausts the hearer; in Split, dense, aggressive activity is offset by passages of transparency, clarity, and calm.

Given the trajectory of the media world in the past ten years since he composed the first version of Split, it’s no wonder the composer sees the new version as considerably darker than the original. At the same time, though, he sees it as a tragicomedy in which its elements are presented for the “thinking, feeling listener,” and the artistically present performers, to inform the experience with their own individual, fundamentally human sensibilities." Read Mr. Zinger's full program note here.

Several excellent reviews followed the world premiere of Split. The Boston Globe called it "astonishing" while the Boston Classical Review noted its "relentless headlong virtuosity" and called it a "well-crafted...considerable achievement."

Listen to Andrew Norman's Sustain (2018):

Sustain/Andrew Norman/Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel, conductor

To learn more about Andrew Norman, visit schott-music.com.

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