The final installment of the Lincoln Center Festival’s retrospective of early works by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker began with something conspicuously absent from the preceding three pieces: a man. […] And on Tuesday, when “Bartok/Mikrokosmos” (1987) had its New York debut at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, he took the stage in front of two facing pianos. […] As Ms. Saunier jumped into Mr. Truszkowski’s arms, the pianists Jean-Luc Fafchamps and Laurence Cornez launched into Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos.”
[…] The following section, a dance-less interlude, was in some ways an echo. Playing Ligeti’s “Monument,” the two pianists, a man and woman, alternated between tangling in the same aural space, the same register, and retreating to opposite ends of their pianos, as the dancers had regularly retreated to opposite sides of the stage. The musical duet was similar to the dance duet, but the music was more interesting.[…] The pianists played wonderfully, and so did the Ictus string quartet in the last segment, set to Bartok’s Quartet No. 4. […]
Brian Seibert, July 16, 2014