Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Cirque du Piano – 1 Piano, 3 Pianists, 6 Hands, 30 Fingers!
Moonlight
Genre: Music
Venue: The Chapel at St Vincent's
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A newly formed piano-troupe, displaying commendable finger-gymnastics, delivers a concert of rarely heard music for three pianists playing a single piano together. Assembled from alumni of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, it’s an exercise in pushing the limits of what a piano can produce. In the right hands of course………
Review
The pews are packed in the atmospheric, candlelit St Vincent’s Chapel down in the New Town, the audience curious to see how you can fit thirty dashing digits onto an eighty eight key grand piano without creating the equivalent of musical chaos that ends in tears. But there wasn’t even a hint of a wrong note as Matthew Shiel led two fellow alumni from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in an exhilarating hour of music, featuring arrangements of well known pieces for three pianists and music composed especially for six hands.
Six hands moving rapidly around a piano keyboard requires careful choreography if you’re to avoid bumping into each other. And some co-ordinated page turning. This was achieved by the pianists dividing the keyboard into three parts, creating, in effect, three mini-pianos, with a piccolo type sound emanating from the right hand third, Shiel commanding the centre stage and covering a lot of the melody, with the remaining pianist providing the rounder sounds of the bass clef.
The finger circus started with an arrangement of Sousa’s rousing The Stars and Stripes Forever, accompanied by a warning from Shiel in his introduction that this was known as “The Disaster March” in theatres and circuses, and only played when there was a need to evacuate the audience quickly from the venue. We moved on to a vibrant arrangement of the overture from Rossini’s Barber of Seville before the mood shifted to the romantic and the melancholic with a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Romance for Six Hands, written when he was only 17 and which formed the prototype for parts of his iconic second piano concerto.
Variety was a feature of this concert. Garoud’s Funeral March of a Marionette was originally composed for a solo pianist but we were treated to the six handed arrangement, the staccato, percussive playing redolent of the clunky movement of a puppet being manipulated on its strings. There was time for a moving interpretation of JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a lovely vignette played on a toy grand piano before a finale featuring Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy.
Now, at this point in the review, I probably should come up with some highfalutin prose describing the individual pianists’ style, how their playing evoked images of free flowing streams or wild mountain landscapes, throwing in adjectives such as “legato”, “jeu perle”, “tinkling” – you know the sort of thing.
But I won’t, because it wouldn’t capture the essence of the concert. This was simply three people doing what they love doing best, and at which they are very, very accomplished practitioners. They were having fun, and it showed. So we all had fun too. Lots of it. Uplifting and joyful in equal measure, this was a concert that will live long in the memory and, since I attended the last one, I hope will be repeated in a future Fringe.
But wait, there’s an encore. Musicians love encores. And they’re playing The Stars and Stripes Forever again. Which can only mean one thing – time to exit, stage left.
