When it came to a future partner, classical pianist Linda Stoodley had made up her mind on one thing: she never wanted to marry another pianist. That is until she met Robert Stoodley on an online dating website. There in his profile picture, the smiling Englishman was sitting at a piano. The pair tells us, “God has a sense of humor.”
On their very second date Robert and Linda began playing the piano together and it wasn’t long until they fell in love, married and began making music together as Piano À Deux. Linda says, “When you start something new, you think ‘is anybody going to like it’?” The pair first performed “I Got Rhythm” in a concert. “We just did three minutes’ worth and the audience laughed. And so, we thought, ‘Oh, well, we’ll do a bit more’ and it sort of grew from there.”
Both Robert and Linda grew up training classically. They had begun to distinguish themselves in individual careers long before they ever met through teaching, directing music at churches and performing. Robert had once thought he would be a linguist and do music on the side, so he learnt French, Latin, German, Italian and Hindi, some Spanish, and some modern Greek. “I can get around Europe pretty well.”
Linda released albums, performed on cruise ships and created unique arrangements. She tells us “I fell in love with accompanying, especially accompanying singers. Eventually I got down to the Guildhall School of Music in London, and did the accompanist course there and was absolutely hooked… I still have a love affair with the singing voice and the song repertoire, you know, everything from Lieder (German song) right up to the American Songbook.”
She shared her love for Gershwin and other performers with Robert. “I remember before we married, I actually sat at a piano and listened to Linda’s arrangements and put a soprano part in on top. So, I was improvising a top part which got us to call it ‘Gershwin in Tiers’ because there were several tiers of the Gershwin with alto, bass and the soprano. It was all done by improvisation to begin with, really, very quickly but we began to discover as we played professionally that these things needed to be written in stone.”
Linda joins in, “We play everything really from Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven. And we’ve also discovered a composer called George Onslow… we feel it’s important to play the really serious stuff and to do it really well and then also to play what we call the crossover stuff, because it’s wonderful music. And having worked for singers for so many years, I mean, music theater, operetta, you know, Lehár, Carmen, all that music. It deserves to be shared really, and in the most wonderful way possible. One of my heroes is a conductor called John Wilson. He conducts orchestras playing music from MGM movies and does it to the nth degree, and I think that’s just phenomenall.”
Robert and Linda have released three albums as Piano À Deux. “Strictly Not Bach”, “France Revisited: Music by Onslow, Debussy & Poulenc” and “Porgy, Preludes & Paris: Gershwin Arrangements for Piano Duo”. They recorded another album “France Revisited” part II that will be released soon. Robert shared, “The editing stage hasn’t been finished yet. So we will be doing that as soon as we can make time for it and then finish it off.” On the track list will be the second sonata by George Onslow as well as Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No.2” and Fauré’s “Dolly Suite”.
The two are also preparing to move to a new home in London which will double as a stage for the couple. “We’re going to have many concerts there, we’ll have people around to talk about music, people who are musicians and have had a hard time over COVID. And we’ll have them around and sort of talk things through with them, just welcome them and grow our musical network. Really, that’s the idea behind it. We’re not just moving there because we want to live in a different house. There’s a kind of vision involved in this.”
To learn more about Piano À Deux tune in to our Connections videocast on July 24th.
Find Robert and Linda’s albums and concert schedule at:
www.pianoduex.com
