Biography​

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Keira—from the Greek cheir, "hand," and from Chiron, the centaur who mastered the arts and sciences by fusing reason and

intuition: the exact image of the DuoKeira Piano Duo, a blend of restraint and drive, in dialogue with those who listen.

This encounter was brought to life in 2008 by Michela Chiara Borghese and Sabrina De Carlo: two pianists united by a passion for chamber music yet profoundly different in temperament and training. For nearly twenty years, this complementarity has dissolved into a single four-hand voice—a space of exchange between two intellectual conceptions and two musical sensibilities, and, at the same time, of dialogue with the audience.

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Concerts and Projects

From the very beginning, their rapport has taken them to leading stages, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Vatican Museums, the Pauline Chapel at the Quirinal Palace, Steinway Hall in Boston, the Auditorium of the National Academy of Dance and the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, UNESCO in Paris, Brandeis University, and the home of Community Music Works in Providence. Part of their mission is also to bring music where it does not usually reach: the DuoKeira often performs in informal and experimental settings, from the Voltaire Cultural Center in Rouen to the Espace Saint-Sauveur at the Corentin Celton hospital in Issy-les-Moulineaux, from the Italian hospitals of the Donatori di Musica network to the Ridotto of the Teatro Comunale in L'Aquila after the 2009 earthquake. The goal is always the same: to start from tradition in order to create new and unexpected emotions, even for those who do not regularly attend concert halls. In this same spirit, the Andante con Fuoco Association was born, through which the duo brings music and the other arts to one of Rome's outlying neighborhoods, creating a space of engaged listening and shared experiences.

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This desire to innovate drives the duo to continually reconfigure its repertoire, pairing original compositions for four hands or two pianos with orchestral transcriptions and contemporary composers: music that has changed its body, from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Fair Melusine transcribed by the composer himself, to the Boléro remade by Ravel's own hands, from The Rite of Spring for four hands to the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, all the way to pages rewritten expressly for them, such as I Buried the Truth by Matteo Sommacal. Fostering dialogue with the other arts, they have conceived event-performances such as Vulnerabili all'amore, Vision, Il giardino incantato, Dream for Two, and Danza con 20 dita!, which combine music, acting, dance, and video projections. Some were created within the Villa Torlonia Roma Piano Duo Festival (VTRP²), directed by the duo in its 2015 and 2016 editions—the first of which hosted the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Fantasy for Two Pianos.

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Discography

• Giochi di piano a quattro mani (RES, 2009)

• Mendelssohn (Brilliant Classics, 2020)

• Barber, Borodin, Debussy, Ravel (Aulicus Classics, 2021)

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Awards

Two special mentions at the IBLA Grand Prize World Music Competition (for Barber and Milhaud) and the Silver Medal – Outstanding Achievement at the 2017 Global Music Awards, for their performance of Samuel Barber's Souvenirs.

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Would you like to discover all the projects and events we have taken part in? Click here!