We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Clara & Marie Becker a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Clara & Marie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Being a performing artist requires a certain willingness to take risks and courage to take decisions that influence your career in a way that is often unforeseeable. Most commonly, instrumentalists pursue their solo studies, focus on their own musical development and most
of the chamber ensembles are formed later on in the course of the musician’s formation or even after graduation.
Being born into a musical family and having had access to the piano from very early on, it was natural for us to play around on the keyboard and discover classical music together.
It was never conceivable for neither of us to envision a career as a soloist.
Since we shared most things in life we also knew we wanted to be a team on stage.
Against the current, we decided to embark on this journey together and didn’t first study individually.
From very early on we worked with artists who specialized on the piano duo genre and took various masterclasses with world renowned musicians who coached us together.
Looking back, this has been a big risk and even now one doesn’t know if our idea will work out in the future. We sometimes wish there was a security for musicians or a way to look into the future.
At the same time this current state of being up in the air belongs to our lives and we have wonderful supporters within our family and friends and colleagues who encourage us.
At the time we felt we didn’t have an alternative in order to pursue our dream and we had to take the risk of walking our very individual path to keep doing what makes us happy.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Besides performing on stage on one or two pianos, we especially love to be creative and have a big interest in many different forms of art. It is important to us to do projects that involve other artists, such as composers, other musicians, photographers or dancers.
The repertoire for our genre is comparably limited and therefore we love to explore lesser played repertoire as much as the masterworks that we often hear in concerts. We also had the chance and honor to premiere works for piano four hands, two pianos and other formations which enriches and expands our repertoire. Our goal is to push boundaries and to create something new with our art. This summer we will host the first edition of a small festival we created and we’re so much looking forward to bringing our ideas and concepts to life with our wonderful friends and colleagues.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

We love the freedom we have to design and shape our working routine. Our sense for responsibility is big and even when we are on a break or vacation our head is partly busy with music related topics. Even though this often annoys us and we would love to switch off our brain for a while, this is what keeps us going and brings us further.
We enjoy being creative and love to plan new projects- what we find a great privilege is that we can decide ourselves on the things we want to do and the repertoire we want to play.
In the end we have to be confident with our choices and present to the audience what we are really convinced of.
All the downsides of being a self employed musician look small compared to the liberty we have to realize our artistic dreams.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

We are often asked if and why we still need to practice if we already play so well. It might be difficult to imagine for non musicians that there is always room to improve and get further and that we are probably never going to dominate the instrument fully.
If we take long breaks, it also takes us a while to get back and of course you loose skills that you developed with lots of time without practice.

One of the things we maybe love the most about being a musician is that you will never stop learning: it’s impossible to play all the repertoire that exists in one lifetime, it’s impossible to know all the works ever composed. It’s extremely unlikely to dominate an instrument fully.
You will always continue to be a student.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.claramariebecker.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claramariebecker?igsh=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@claramariebecker?si=Tmfj0MrvHLbujrK9

Image Credits
Jonas Becker, Komcébo, private