Katia & Marielle Labèque

Born in Bayonne, France in on March 11,1950 and March 6, 1952, respectively, classical piano playing sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque began their career together in 1970, recording Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen under the composer's direction. Both together and separately, their recitals and recordings met with great success. In 1980, their album Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue - Piano Concerto in F went gold. The Labèque sisters were very prolific from this period to the end of the 1990s. Recorded with a host of rock stars, the album Carnaval (1997) was their last before a ten-year hiatus during which they took on different activities. Married to conductor Semyon Bychkov, Marielle Labèque reunited with her sister in 2005 to set up a foundation in Rome, a recording studio and the KML Recordings label, which in 2012 released the anthology Minimalist Dream House, dedicated to fifty years of minimalist music. Katia and Marielle Labèque's repertoire was vast, ranging from the classical and romantic periods to contemporary composers. Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Philippe Boesmans and Michael Nyman have each composed one of their works for them. In 2015, they premiered on stage David Chalmin's composition Star Cross'd Lovers, which they coupled with Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story for the album Love Stories (2017). Two years later, Dessner: El Chan included the composer’s title piece, as well as his Concerto for Two Pianos, conducted by Matthias Pintscher. The sisters then worked with Philip Glass on piano transcriptions of the three operas based on Jean Cocteau's plays, Orphée, La Belle et la Bête and Les Enfants Terribles, collected in the box set Glass: Cocteau Trilogy (2024), which ranked among the best-selling classical music albums in France (number 11) and the UK (number 4).

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