Music and Fashion Series | Glittering Sounds and Sights from Star Piano Duo

As she takes the stage in a sparkling, multicoloured, sequin slip dress, a wave of excitement passes through the crowd. Pianist Elizabeth Joy Roe walks over confidently to the elegant Steinway grand piano accompanied by her duo partner, Greg Anderson, at Montreal’s Centre Pierre-Péladeau. Anderson wears a smartly tailored black Zara suit: understated, elegant, perfect.

Within seconds, they embark on one of the most transcendent second halves of any piano recital I’ve heard. Roe’s dress—mercurial, with its golden tones contrasting their dark background—reflects the rich harmonic palette of the two opening pieces: an original transcription of Gustav Holst’s Neptune from his orchestral suite The Planets, followed by Maurice Ravel’s Daybreak from his ballet Daphnis et Chloé, arranged by Vyacheslav Gryaznov.

Photo: Nathanael Charpentier 2023

Piano duo embraces fashion

Over the course of a 20-yearlong creative musical partnership, Anderson and Roe have embraced the symbiotic marriage of music and fashion unlike any other classical piano duo of our age. Their enduring success and worldwide fanbase demonstrates that the ground-breaking use of fashion in their live shows and viral videos has captured audiences in a unique way.

Both graduates of the Juilliard School where they met in the early 2000s, Anderson and Roe have become an international blockbuster on the classical music world stage. They have performed over 1,000 recitals on four continents and 21 countries, created 68 music videos with over 20 million views, and hosted the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Their last appearance in Montreal was previewed by La Scena Musicale in the 2024 April/May issue.

Roe draws her fashion inspiration from close to home. “My mom has always been my personal fashion icon,” she says. “She’s always had an artistic sensibility in the way she would dress. It wasn’t flashy, but she would find something personal in which she was comfortable,” explains the Juilliard graduate.

Roe’s mother

Fashion inspirations

As a little girl, Roe recalls her mother’s style, noting the way she would “throw a headscarf on and gather an outfit that looked very classy and elegant with a little bit of an edge.” Her mom was the only person that she consulted when trying on wedding gowns, Roe points out.

Anderson’s taste is more dramatic. “I like anything that’s completely over the top imaginative and fantastical, and that makes my jaw drop,” he says. When it comes to his own fashion sense, however, Anderson opts for clean, classic styles. “I don’t want fashion to define me: I like it to be neutral, so that my own personality can shine through.”

Lose Yourself to Dance

The relationship between image and essence is of primary concern for the duo, particularly as it allows them to represent implicit meanings in musical themes through the visual presentation of their performances. “When making a music video,” says Anderson, “we ask ourselves what is it we are trying to convey to our audience, and what is the spirit of the music about.” Fashion is both a deliberate tool and an intuitive channel with which they aim to make classical music a relevant and powerful force in society. “It affects everything we do: the choice of music on a program; the way we introduce a piece on stage; how we handle our social media; and how we write our own pieces,” explains Anderson.

Duo’s piano videos

One of their earliest viral videos, Libertango, demonstrates the complementary relationship between sight and sound, as the duo emphasizes the underlying sensuality in Astor Piazolla’s music. Set in a roomy classroom, two ‘preppy’ undergrads exchange suggestive glances as they struggle to stay awake during a dreary physics lecture. Slumber ensues, giving way to a sizzling fantasy: Roe wears a short, 2000s-style crop top and bell-bottomed leggings as she stands provocatively over a grand piano.

The camera shoots up towards Anderson and Roe playing the famed tango motive on the piano. Anderson wears black leather jeans and a tight short-sleeved shirt. The torrid chemistry between the pair intensifies as additional layers of counterpoint, syncopation, and dissonances turn up the heat—musically and otherwise.

The juxtaposition between the two sets of clothing brings out “the dangerousness, the messiness, the risk taking of the music” says Anderson. “Every single [fashion choice]is trying to make the music more relevant to our viewers.” For their arrangement of Daft Punk’s Lose Yourself to Dance, the duo referenced 1970s disco fashion “with a modernist twist, sort of tongue in cheek” says Roe. They wore bell-bottom pants, 1970s vintage clothing, and shot the clip in a roller skate rink.

Lose Yourself to Dance outfits

“We start with a strong concept for a music video, then we work with whatever we have,” says Roe. “We may run to Zara to get an outfit—like the ’60s shift dress I got for our Let it Be video—go to thrift stores, or look into our own closet and try to be creative.”

For all their playfulness, outfit choices are subject to practical criteria which allow the pair to be comfortable while executing the complex choreography required by their four-hand arrangements. While she enjoys wearing elaborate gowns for her solo concerto performances, Roe avoids anything that may cause collisions between them. “For concerts, I usually avoid the big ball gown because it’s going to be too cumbersome” explains Roe.

Let it Be MV 2

At their Montreal concert last Spring, Roe wore a red one-sleeve dress by Chiara Boni. “It’s easy to pack, easy to put on. They’re very form-fitting, so you’ve got to choose the right size,” clarifies Roe.

Colour palettes carefully reflect the music they perform. The Chiara Boni dress was intended to emphasize the sensuality of Carmen Fantasy, their arrangement of Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen. “The red in the first half is a very strong colour, and it was great for the passion of that piece,” says Roe. For the more transcendent, celestial-themed second half, Roe wore a sequinned dress that “upped the ante, because it catches the light so awesomely. People like to see the razzle-dazzle glitter on stage,” says Roe.

Chiara Boni gown. Photo: Nathanael Charpentier 2023

The charismatic duo proudly pushes the envelope of what traditional four-hand / two piano recitals look and sound like. Much of the four-hand repertoire reflects the bourgeois socio-economic background in which it was composed and performed. As Anderson points out, music written for piano four hands tends to be very domestic. Often, duos are confined to works such as Debussy’s Petite suite, Fauré’s Dolly suite, or various arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Challenging convention, Anderson and Roe have arranged popular hits for four hands and two pianos and are programming major classical blockbusters such as Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “A lot of the music that we choose to play is worth elevating,” explains Anderson. In the case of the Carmen Fantasy, “we’re playing a whole opera in 13 minutes—and opera is known for excess, both on stage and in the audience. People dress up to go to see the opera, and we want to lift our audience into that universe.”

Perhaps their most daring video production to date is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In a dynamic 30-minute video, the duo wrestle with the elements of fire and water, juxtaposing scenes of pagan rituals with images of modern urban architecture, over a burning piano. “We wanted outfits that bring out the primal spirit as well as mythical aspects of the music,” says Roe.

Roe borrowed her mother’s traditional Korean attire. She wore a dress, but removed the outer covering, and added an African tribal mask. “I wanted it to be devoid of any obvious representation,” she says, instead opting for “a mishmash of different aesthetic qualities,” which better represented the character that she was playing.

Primavera Porteña

Roe’s outfit was picked intentionally to convey the idea of a 21^st-century sacrifice. “We were thinking about [the idea of]sacrificing our material selves” explains Anderson. “Liz wore a ball gown that occupied a lot of space and masked as much of her body as possible. She became almost shapeless, and it was this form of mask that ultimately gets shed and sacrificed by the end of the film.” As they shed their clothing and remain naked in the water, gasping for air under a dark storm, the two of them have symbolically returned to their primal, unobstructed, “original” selves.

Rite of Spring

Taking on ‘heightened versions’ of themselves

Music videos help both Roe and Anderson explore more “heightened versions” of themselves. Roe wore 6-inch spiked heeled boots for the Rite of Spring video, which provided her with a “rocker intensity” that allowed her to embody the musical emotion of the work more effectively. For one of their more recent music videos, Roe wore an Issey Miyake outfit unlike anything she’s worn in the past. “I love the way that the sleeves looked on the screen,” she says. “It has [an]amorphous, avant-garde construction. I think we’ll continue to explore new avenues and try to be adventurous, but always true to ourselves,” she concludes.

Mambo at Washington Square park

Mambo at Steinway Factory in NYC

In live performance as much as through videos, the duo attempts to showcase yet another version of themselves. “We like the concerts to feel like an experience for our audiences. We feel that the visual aspect, even subconsciously, plays into the audience’s enjoyment of the experience,” says Roe. They want audiences to feel like the music they play is “special, awesome stuff worthy of putting a nice outfit on for,” explains Anderson. “We almost want it to feel like a James Bond experience: the sexiness, the danger, and the glamour—it’s a bit of that heightened slightly provocative vibe that we are embodying,” says Roe.

Saturday Night Waltz

Despite joining together vastly disparate symbolism, worlds do not clash when Anderson and Roe take the stage. Instead, they seamlessly glide one unto the other, creating a complex and beautiful mosaic—a reflection of their authentically postmodern sensibility.