There are piano duos that play side by side, and there are piano duos that play into each other. The Brussels-based Fiona and Chiara Alaimo clearly belong to the latter category. With Échos, they release a debut album that puts two living composers in the spotlight: Sharad Goulam and Gabriel Field. Two friends, two worlds, one piano. Or rather: two pianos, four hands, and a conversation that began long before the first note. The result is a recording in which silence becomes as important as sound, in which dissonance does not ask for resolution, but is treated as color, and in which contemporary music is not presented as an intellectual exercise, but as something living, tangible and human. For Klassiek Centraal, Werner De Smet spoke with both sisters Alaimo.
Music as a creeping story
When I meet the sisters, it immediately strikes me how averse they are to grand, theatrical gestures. Music was not a sudden revelation for them, not a conscious life choice announced with trumpet fanfare. "It rather quietly slipped into our lives, carried by the many projects we participated in along the way," they say. "Like a love story that begins in friendship and imperceptibly deepens into something greater. Perhaps because our fascination has always lay more with the intimacy and beauty of playing itself, than with standing in the spotlight." You believe them immediately. No dramatic turning point, no moment of revelation – rather an attention that quietly takes root.
That intimacy was nurtured by a strikingly layered youth. Alongside a deep affection for the emotional architecture of Chopin and Rachmaninov, the raw, rhythmic energy of Linkin Park and System of a Down resonated equally in their teenage room. For the sisters, there is no strict division between genres: music is first and foremost an emotional world. The concerts they attended as children together with their parents also shaped and deepened that love. That open outlook was later, at the Royal Conservatoire Brussels, channeled by Aleksandar Madžar. For six years he worked with them – not as a rigid pedagogue, but with rare warmth and generosity. "Every now and then we still have coffee together," they say. "His humor, his humanity and his way of looking at music remain a source of inspiration." A sentence that sounds like a sincere bow, not a polite phrase. Both sisters followed an individual solo trajectory alongside their duo work – including at the KCB and the École Normale de Musique de Paris – which allowed each of them to develop their own musical identity within the same pedagogical foundation.
That they today also consciously distance themselves from music is something the sisters only learned to practice in recent years. Previously, music took up their entire life, from early morning to late evening. Gradually they realized that silence and distance are also necessary – reading, sports, chess, singing, spending time with family and friends – in order to return to the piano again and again with fresh ears.
Two people, one voice
Although they are biologically and mentally closely intertwined, the artistic gain lies in the nuances of their contrasting characters. Fiona is the conceptual motor, the one who activates the score with unexpected – sometimes slightly absurd – ideas, and scribbles her sheet music with annotations and signs. Chiara is the pragmatic architect who puts the ideas into motion, prefers the whiteness of an untouched score, and breaks the silence of rehearsal by continuing to search and experiment. It is precisely this productive tension that protects their playing from the trap of sterility.
They have indeed developed one artistic voice, they say, but they try not only to form one sound, but at the same time to remain consciously audible as two separate musical identities within that same sound space. "So that listeners also feel that we are two different people who complement each other and enrich each other's interpretations." That conversation nourishes them outside of music as well. They quote their father: "Il y en a toujours plus dans deux têtes que dans une." And they cite the Duffer Brothers – the twin brothers behind Stranger Things – as an example of how a shared artistic vision can become something greater than the sum of its parts. It is a striking reference in a classical music conversation, but precisely for that reason apt: the Alaimos think in analogies that reach beyond the concert stage.
The quartet on the cover
The works on Échos are divided between two composers whose friendship goes back to their shared study time at the Cortot school in Paris, the same school where the Alaimos got to know them. That the album has its roots precisely there is for the sisters no coincidence but a conscious act of gratitude. "We wanted to bring our French roots to life," they say. "The numerous opportunities we received at the Cortot school were for us a way to thank and highlight French culture and music." Échos is thus also a portrait of a city, a school and a friendship.
Sharad Goulam delivers a Toccata, a Prélude V and a Marche. Gabriel Field contributes eight Chorals and the triptych Pièces Joyeuses. The cover shows a quartet, but those who look more closely see two pianists and two composers. An aesthetic alliance that is already announced in the image.
The division of tasks between the sisters usually runs smoothly, but with Goulam's Toccata democracy broke down for a moment. Both wanted to play it. Fate had to decide. Fiona drew the longest straw. "Since then, that Toccata officially belongs a little bit more to her," they say, with the dry precision of people who know that a good anecdote doesn't need an exclamation mark.
"Their personalities seem almost each other's opposite," the sisters describe their composers. "Goulam departs from a pronounced dramatic, almost physically sculptured sound world. Field, on the other hand, employs a minimalist, almost ethereal language – as if the trace of an already vanished thought." What connects them, however, does not lie in the obvious. Not the style, not the tempo, not the idiom. Rather, their treatment of dissonance: in both cases not tension that needs to be resolved, but a colour in itself. A way to deepen the palette of sound. The Alaimos recognise that approach as the quiet bridge between two seemingly opposite worlds.
Analyse, release, rediscover
What stands out in their working method is the combination of intellectual analysis and conscious intuitive ripening. New scores are first dissected in an almost scientific way: each detail is examined until a clear picture emerges of how the composer thought and felt the music. Then comes a surprising step: step back. The music must be allowed to settle outside the piano, outside the rehearsal room. Only months later do they return to the same work, now with their own experiences and emotions as an additional layer. From that individual processing, a shared interpretation gradually grows. That process became even richer with Échos because they could speak directly with the composers and also engage in discussion when a passage they played turned out to be intended differently from their interpretation. "That interaction is exactly what's most interesting," they say. At the same time, they refuse to ever regard their readings as definitive. "Interpretations become sharper and more deeply rooted over time, but at the same time there is always room for change. Perhaps that is the most beautiful thing about music."
The paradox of irony and silence
In Goulam's Prélude V and Marche, the sisters are forced into an extremely precise polyphonic discipline, where each voice must be able to move completely independently without tearing the larger fabric. A composer who places the pianist in complex technical situations and treats polyphony as architecture.
With Field, the difficulty paradoxically lies in brevity. His eight Chorals are at first glance refined miniatures, but the sisters refuse that reading: "They are actually much more complex than they appear." The tension lies in the voice leading, in the way individual lines move without merging. Each Choral is its own world. They do not form a continuous chain; they exist side by side, like people in a waiting room, each carrying their own thoughts.
Their description of the Pièces Joyeuses is most precise: three pieces that hide a dark, almost eerie world beneath their ironic title. "For a brief moment hope flickers, but it is repeatedly swallowed up by something elusive and dark." As performers, they say, they have "surprisingly little to do," which probably means they do everything they can to add as little as possible to it. One must resist the temptation to gloss over it with clichés.
It is in these pieces that silence transforms into essential building material. The sisters do not approach the rests as merely an absence of sound, but as a charged space: "Silence is also music. The tension that can be created through silences is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful means a musician can use to bring a piece to life and make it breathe." They do not formulate this as a philosophical observation, but as a professional determination. Two pianists learning to be silent together – that is an art in itself.
From laboratory to stage
Échos was recorded at Studio de Meudon on a Steinway Model D, with microphones close to the pianos and dry acoustics. "A kind of laboratory work," they call it themselves – clear, transparent, every colour and afterimage ruthlessly visible. That unforgiving clarity was unexpectedly prepared by their work on the film The Chapel, where they learned how to repeat the same passage multiple times in a row with identical intensity – a process that surprisingly closely resembles studio work. On stage everything is different: there the hall weighs, the audience, the energy of the moment. The interpretation is strongly influenced by it – and that is not a drawback, but a gift.
The live environment also gives them the opportunity to break down the perceived barrier of contemporary music. During a solo concert in Sainte-Savine, Fiona took the microphone to guide the audience through specific motifs from the score – highlighting melodies like a guide explaining a painting without interpreting it. This project speaks to a deep sense of artistic responsibility. The duo refuses to wait until history has filtered these scores: "Waiting a hundred years until this music is included in the standard repertoire seems unnecessary to us nowadays." A small but clear program statement: contemporary music deserves an audience now, not a future archive.
Two words as an echo
At the end of our conversation, I ask the sisters to describe each other musically in one word. They laugh and refuse the task. One word is not enough. Because there are two of them, they prefer to suggest two words instead: joy and generosity.
These are also the words that best describe this album: music that gives something to the listener, that leaves room for personal memories, images, even scents. Échos does not seek the easy, immediate impact of virtuosic effect, but settles slowly, compellingly and with serene layering in the memory. It is not an album that gives away its meaning immediately. It is one that reverberates, as an echo should.
Joy and generosity – an album was rarely summed up more accurately.