The history of musical marriages is rich in fascinating stories, and the husband-and-wife piano duo of Lukas Geniušas and Anna Geniushene certainly stands out among the most compelling examples. Both were born in Moscow separated by a year and the couple, now in their mid-thirties, have been together for more than half of their respective lives. They have three children, including two boys, ages three and five, and a daughter who was born just three and a half months ago.
Heart to Heart is a potent metaphor for their upcoming concert featuring two-piano arrangements of works by Rachmaninoff, Copland, John Adams and Colin McPhee, which will be presented by the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation April 13 at 7:30 p.m. at the Jeanné Wagner Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Their trajectories as world-class pianists started at different points in their lives, but also have converged in their marriage with gratifying personal and artistic results.
The 2010 gold medalist for Bachauer’s International Artists Competition, Geniušas was celebrating his 20th birthday the evening he won, with his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. He started piano at the age of five and by the following year, he was performing in public. Piano is definitely in his genes. His parents were pianists, as was his grandmother, the legendary Vera Gornostayeva, perhaps his strictest and most impactful mentor.
Undoubtedly, Geniušas’ public career skyrocketed during his youth. In 2005, he took second prize in Bachauer’s Young Artists Competition. In an interview with the The Utah Review, he said, “It was a recapitulation for me to be able to return to Salt Lake City five years later, where there was a certain success and I felt bold and confident. I had studied with many great teachers, especially my grandmother and coming back to win the gold medal on my birthday was the best gift that anyone could ask for.” With the Bachauer gold, Geniušas had the assurance he needed to compete shortly afterward in Warsaw’s International Chopin Piano Competition, where he won second prize. Throughout the 2010s, he performed 75 to 80 concerts annually.
Meanwhile, Geniushene, who did not come from a musical family like her husband, was steadily developing her musicianship and artistry, along with sharing Geniušas’ passion for adventurous repertoire that dove deeply into the works of many 20th century composers.
In 2006, a year after the 15-year-old Geniušas had won second prize in Bachauer’s young artists competition, the young Geniushene was at her most critical moment as a pianist. She had failed the entrance exam at the Chopin College of Music in Moscow but was given the chance to enter and take the theory exams. In a 2025 interview published elsewhere, she said, “Thanks to perfect pitch and my ambitions – I ended up being second in the pool of the admitted students.” She met Lukas when they were both 17, whom she described as “a constant source of inspiration.” She added, “Another deep influence was his grandmother [Vera Gornostayeva], whom I admired profoundly as both an artist and teacher, and with whom I always dreamed of studying, though I never had the chance.”
It was a just matter of time before her career would find its own skyrocketing path. That came after she won the silver medal in the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which was followed by debuts at the Kennedy Center, Wiener Konzerthaus, and Tonhalle Zurich, and performances with the Taipei and Lithuanian Symphony Orchestras.
While both pianists have recorded their own critically acclaimed albums, the duo recorded an album released last year that includes two-piano arrangements which pay tribute to American works by Gershwin, Stravinsky, Copland and McPhee, as well as Frederic Rzewski’s North American Ballads (1978–79) and John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction.
“Playing as a duo is a natural part of our experience,” Geniušas said. The couple conceived the album, which includes several pieces that they will perform at the upcoming Bachauer performance, with geotags in mind. Geniušas said it started with Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Chamber Piano Concerto, which was commissioned in the 1930s to celebrate the wedding anniversary of the couple who owned the estate eponymously named in the music. In fact, Stravinsky also had made a two-piano arrangement of the piece. “So we built up the repertoire, thinking about how geographical attachment is intertwined with the music that we play and inspires us,” Geniušas said. This included works such as Gershwin’s Cuban Overture. Geniushene also was drawn to Copland’s El Salón México, one of the works on the album which will be featured at the Bachauer concert.
If there are two works that epitomize the musical exploration the couple shared in cultivating their artistry for the album and which will be performed at the concert, they are McPhee’s Balinese Ceremonial Music (comprising three movements) and Adams’ Hallelujah Junction.
McPhee, born in 1900, was ahead of his time, signaling in his works composed during the 1930s the potential of minimalism that would emerge decades later in the likes of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Fascinated by the gamelan, McPhee, who studied with Edgard Varèse, was the first Western composer to pursue an ethnomusicological study of Bali.
Just as Reich has characterized McPhee’s music, Geniušas said McPhee’s music stands out for its naturally indigenous and minimalistic interpretation of the folk music of the East. Indeed, McPhee’s music would have been an extraordinary experience to what would have been familiar to the Western ear in the 1930s and 1940s.
In Balinese Ceremonial Music, completed sometime before 1938, the two pianos emulate the ringing sonorities of the gamelan’s metallophones. Pemoengkah, the opening movement, echoes the Kebyar style, with complex, intertwined melodic and rhythmic phrases, marked by alternating sudden and subtle shifts in textures, colors and dynamics. Gambangan, the second movement, incorporates a five-note scale just as in the Kebyar style and is symbolic of the music that would have been used in cremation rites. Taboeh Teloe, the final movement, is music for celebration, as signified by the oldest foundational style of the gamelan, Gamelan gong gedé.
As for the Adams’ selection, it also is a quintessential music geotag. Choreographer Peter Martins, who used Adams’ Hallelujah Junction for his 2003 piece Guide to Strange Places recalled in a Playbill interview with Frank Oteri, what the composer told him, “‘All you should know is that Hallelujah Junction is a little town in Northern California that has a gas station and a grocery store.’ I said, ‘Is there anything else I should know?’ and he said no.”
As for the opening to Heart to Heart, the duo will open appropriately with music by a titan from their homeland: the two-piano arrangement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Op. 45.
For tickets and more information, see the Bachauer website.