[Kirk] I'm Kirk Whipple.

And I'm Marilyn Morales.

We are a husband and wife team of composers and pianists and educators.

And we make music, we teach, we write, we arrange, and one of our mottoes is from Bach to rock and everything in between, Hopefully.

We're always learning.

Yes, we are.

Yes, we're.

Yeah, it's like the Cuban author said, "You're born learning and you die learning."

And that's our lives, you know.

Well, we met each other in 1988 at a piano competition in Portland, Maine.

I beat him.

Yeah, she did.

But I won The poor guy.

I won the prize.

And we got married in 1992.

We wrote a two-piano concerto.

And let me tell you, it was like we needed a marriage counselor before we got married, you know, so, because I composed and he composed, and so we kind of like collide.

It is almost like having two people cooking at the same time.

You know, it's really hard.

You'd better like each other's spices.

Yeah, well, we had a really great referee, our composition teacher, W.A.

Mathieu.

And he was like, "Okay, you do this, and you do that," and you know, he set us straight.

[Kirk] And that was for two pianos in a 50piece orchestra on our wedding.

[Marilyn] And we got married in between the movements.

♪ Always remember ♪ These are pieces that have been percolating for quite a while.

I mean, her musical "Always Remember" about the Cuban American experience, she had been working on that for over 25 years before we premiered it a little piece at a time, and after a while she got the 24 songs, all the incidental music.

And we were able to launch the world premiere production in 2022 in South Florida.

And similarly, my piece "Macabrifesto" had been percolating, and we did a workshop of it in 2012 for one piano, six hands and choir.

But I decided that the piece needed a little bit more of a fuller balance, and it gave me the opportunity for us to bring our friends across from Europe.

We call ourselves the United Nations Piano Quartet.

And so now "Macabrifesto" is for two pianos, eight hands, bass and percussion and choir and soloists.

We don't do anything small, you know?

I don't know if you noticed, but everything we do is [Kirk] Bang, bang.

You know, I mean even the We have small pieces too.

Yeah, no, we do, one piano, four hands or two-piano things, you know, but, I mean And we've also written a lot of pieces for two pianos, four hands that we play and one piano, four hands.

With two pianos, four hands, you have one pianist on each piano.

We're in our space.

It's nice and easy.

We have all the room we need.

We don't have to worry about bumping into each other.

Now, conversely, on one piano, four hands, one thing, it's a lot easier to find just one piano in a venue.

Also, there's an added challenge, and it's more immediate 'cause you're both right there, but there's a challenge because there's an intermediate step that we call traffic.

Before you can interpret the piece, you go, "Oh, there's your hand.

Oh, I gotta get around it."

Well, have you seen the size of those hands?

I mean, they're huge.

He took my pinky one time.

We both missed the last chord.

It was like, you know?

So traffic.

'Cause you got, yeah, traffic.

That's an issue with one piano, four hands.

And the sound is different, of course.

With one piano four hands, it's more intimate, you could say, because you have the, you just, I said just the one piano, but one piano.

With two pianos, you have an expanded range of sonorities.

It becomes more symphonic perhaps.

And then with two, yeah, the two pianos, eight hands is even harder.

Yes.

'Cause you have to, now you have to not only work the traffic, each one of us in each piano, but also the traffic and also The ensemble.

The ensemble is so hard, you know?

And we're very lucky.

I mean, it's like we really hit it on together great with Mark and, you know.

And we should say, too, that this setting of the United Nations Piano Quartet, there's three founding members, Marilyn and I and Mark SoleLeris.

Our other founding member, Frederic Chauvel, he's had to bow out for health reasons.

But we're thrilled that Soraya Zlitni is stepping in for him.

So when Frederic said, "I can't come, Mark," I said, "Oh, how am I gonna manage this one?

I need somebody who has a high-class piano playing, classical piano playing, but who could also play in different styles" because Kirk Whipple's writing is quite complex, especially rhythmically and also harmonically.

And I thought Soraya could do the job, and she's definitely doing a very good job.

Thanks, so my name is Soraya, and I'm privileged to play "Macabrifesto" of Kirk Whipple and honored to replace Frederic Chauvel.

The United Nations Piano Quartet is in here for the world premiere of "Macabrifesto."

And in fact, we have an international cultural exchange program between Miami-Dade County and France, which helped us to raise the funds to bring them out here.

And next year we're going across to do the same piece with French vocalists and instrumentalists.

So it's very, very exciting for us that we can do something that's international.

♪ Goodbye ♪ ♪ Doesn't seem like he's off them by far ♪ I mean, it's like, and if you wanna talk about "Always Remember" first and then "Macabrifesto"?

Sure, sure, sure.

You know, it's like, I love musicals, really love musicals, but I was searching, I was trying to do something that could stand the times like "West Side Story" or "Sound of Music," you know, something that really, really was strong and not just repetitive.

So I wrote, I have a salsa piece.

I have a classical piece actually that I used.

It's a Chopin etude, and then I wrote a trio on top of that.

I kept the Chopin etude exactly the same, but I did a thing on the trio on top.

I have a mambo.

I have a rumba.

So, I mean, I try And all very accessible to audiences.

Yeah, and It's not something that we're trying to get past the audience, that you're trying to get past the audience.

And at the same time, it's challenging for the musicians.

So it's not something that anyone can, well, they could sing it, but they have to practice, you know?

So I made it so, and it's tonal.

I mean, there's nothing crazy, you know, wild thing.

Well, and conversely, my piece, "Macabrifesto," eight pieces.

It's a smaller set.

"Always Remember," it was a threehour production including the intermission, and "Macabrifesto" is about a 50minute set of eight pieces I set to American and British poems.

And so it did a little bit of a different process.

She wrote all the lyrics, the story and everything for "Always Remember," and I helped her by orchestrating, and whereas with "Macabrifesto," the words were written for me by the greatest poets in history.

♪ Above me at my chamber door ♪ [Kirk] And then I scored it for the choir and two pianos, percussion, bass.

♪ Forever more ♪ It's even hard to play just alone with our metronome.

It's hard.

So with our partner, it's harder.

And with the other duo, complicated just to match the Exponentially.

Sometimes five times.

It gets more and more difficult.

With Marilyn being a passionate and romantic expressive pianist, and Kirk is the wild, I don't know, he's just quite a phenomenon, is Kirk Whipple.

And he's the rhythmical, energetic guy.

So it's a really, a subtle mix of different kind.

And Soraya in a way has some qualities also of Fred, 'cause Fred, she has a very good rhythmical sense.

So that's part of the things why it works well, and I'm more the maybe the more expressive kind of guy.

So it's, you know, and it's also a story of friendship and of love between people, and this is what do together today.

♪ Ah ♪ There's immediacy to being in live performance that you can't, I'm sorry, you cannot get from a screen, you can't get from an iPhone.

When you get into the space and you hear the sonorities and you see the other people who are sharing the experience, there's nothing like it.

Really what it is for us, the real excitement is being there in the flesh with real instruments and people.

Yeah, I actually had a student one time that the mother kept asking, I said, "When was the last time you took her to a piano recital?"

And so then she took her, and the girl was practicing, practicing, practicing.

So she comes in the next week, and she says, "I don't know how to make her stop."

And I say, "That's not my problem."