Double Dream/Letters to Milena, Kings Place, London

If classical improvisation is difficult, it’s doubly so when the goal is transposition into jazz; how two pianists can combine together in this way is hard to imagine. But for the Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy, two heads have long been better than one. His defining infant experience was hearing phrases which came through the wall from a violinist who was practising next door, and finding he could answer him on the piano. Later in life, rehearsals for Double Dream – in which he and the Ukrainian pianist Misha Alperin would turn Bach, Chopin, and Debussy into jazz – have had, for logistical reasons, to take place over the telephone.

And with their Steinways interlocking in the perfect acoustic of Kings Place, we heard the results. They started with the lights down, opening with a rumination on Schumann’s “Prophet Bird” which rang out gorgeously in the gloom, then, with twin video screens focusing on hands and faces, they embarked on the most extraordinary classical/jazz conversation I’ve ever heard. Sometimes the classical pieces were first played straight, and then ingeniously messed with – subverting a poised Chopin mazurka by suddenly dropping it a semitone, letting a Debussy Etude with a walking bass suddenly run so fast that it took off into space. Using a cross between a bagpipe and a mouth organ, Alperin launched into an Armenian dance by Komitas, which Rudy countered with mournful Arabic octaves; Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” came in obliquely and stratospherically high, then found its feet in a majestic full-dress performance. A dainty tune by Haydn seemed to close the proceedings, was blown to smithereens by monumental crashing chords, then resurfaced like a perfumed musical box amid smoking ruins: in this interplay between seriousness and mockery, nothing was what it seemed for very long.

The following night’s collaboration was between Rudy and the actor Peter Guinness: in Letters to Milena, Kafka’s love letters to his young paramour were accompanied by a selection of pieces from Janacek’s In the Mists and On an Overgrown Path. The result was hauntingly dramatic: the morose urgency with which Guinness infused the words was answered by a kaleidoscope of emotions from the piano; each art form was enriched by the other.