Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Neo-Art Piano Duo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Neo-Art Piano Duo, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

We have been working on a project of arranging the complete Jazz Suite No. 2 (Suite for Variety Orchestra), originally written for the orchestra, into four-hands on one piano. This has been a long process, but we are on the final stage of completing the score.

What made this project even more special is that we premiered a complete performance of this arrangement back in October, 2023 in Kansas City for a concert for “Classical Music Express,” a local concert series in Kansas City that aims to bring Classical music more accessible to the community by offering free admissions concerts. This lines up perfectly with our goal of doing this arrangement, which is to bring orchestral music more accessible to be performed everywhere. Since bringing an orchestra is not easy as it requires a lot of personnel and large space.

Now that we have completed our arrangement, we are working towards publishing and recording our arrangement. We are very excited to do more projects and performances!

Neo-Art Piano Duo, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Thank you for having us. We are the Neo-Art Piano Duo, with two pianists, Regina Tanujaya and Matteo Generani. While Neo-Art Piano Duo is based in Kansas City, MO, Regina is from Indonesia, and Matteo is from Italy. As a duo, we try to perform music that showcases different cultures from the past and present. We chose the name Neo-Art because we always want to bring something new to our audiences.

The Neo-Art Piano Duo performs repertoires for four hands (on one piano) and two pianos. We want to be versatile, and we offer unique and interesting performances. We mainly perform classical music but can easily expand our genres depending on our interests. For example, as a duo, we also make our arrangements of pieces we love. Our interest has been to perform pieces, usually for larger ensembles or the orchestra, in more venues and to be more accessible to larger audiences. As a piano duo, we can condense a large-scale work to be heard by performing on one piano. This has benefitted smaller venues or facilities without a big budget, as bringing an entire orchestra to them is challenging.

We love and want to collaborate with different artists and create multidisciplinary events or performances. We want to try new ways to perform, and we also want to create new music. Aside from performing other composer’s works, we are now composing our own works to perform. We are always looking for new ways to improve and innovate our music and performances.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Aside from being a duo, each of us is also a solo performer and educator. We often pondered on how lonely life as a pianist is, because we mainly practice by ourselves, we have to decide and manage everything work related ourselves. Since we are friends, we have been playing together since 2018, mainly just for fun and occasionally to perform together as an addition to our solo performances. After realizing how well we worked together, we officially formed the Neo-Art Piano Duo in 2022 and performed professionally.

We found great excitement and joy, exchanging ideas, in exploring and performing music together. Our mission is to share that passion of music and new things we discovered, to as many people as possible.
Since 2018, we have performed together on many occasions, from outreach performances in retirement homes, being guest artists for a 10-day residency performing concerts in Florida, to bigger concerts at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, Kansas City, MO.

Neo-Art Piano Duo also serves as co-artistic directors for Classical Music Express, a concert series in Kansas City, that presents Classical music concerts with free admissions to make Classical music more accessible to the general public and young audiences. We also perform frequently in this concert series, performing our own arrangements, compositions, and other masterpieces from other composers.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding thing about being an artist is that we are never bored. We are always thinking about coming up with new ideas, new projects, and new performances. We are always brainstorming and have many things to look forward to. In fact, even when we have a day off and decide to just relax and hang out, most of the time, we end up with a new project or we end up creating a new video. We are both quite spontaneous and we love trying new things!

Aside from that, we also gained energy from each other. We are very fortunate that we have been enjoying every moment of our work together. This is probably thanks to the fact that we became friends since we met, mainly due to our similar personalities, sense of humor, and love for music. We are a relatively new group and have been having a blast working together.

We feel so fortunate that we work together as good friends, because even dealing with more mundane tasks, such as emailing, marketing, and social media management, becomes pleasant. We have had positive and productive teamwork.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.neoartpianoduo.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neoartpianoduo/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neoartpianoduo/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@neoartpianoduo