The audience begins to clap, gradually gathering speed in time with the pianists on stage. Willed on by the percussive accelerando, the duo zips through Zorba’s Dance, a piece by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis that evokes ouzo-soaked taverns and hot summer nights. The dark-haired pianists, virtually identical in sunglasses and denim shorts, finish their own arrangement of Greece’s popular musical export with a flourish.
As the sun makes a lengthy retreat behind the tree-lined stage, musicians invite young audience members to try out some instruments. A child delights at blowing a clarinet mouthpiece, another tentatively presses piano keys. These guests have come from one of the refugee camps that remain on Lesbos, the Turkey-adjacent island that unwittingly became the centre of the 2015 migrant crisis.
The sisters who co-created a musical festival in sun-soaked Greece
A short while later, the stage lights – and mosquito repellent – are out in full force. The pianists, Greek-German sisters Danae and Kiveli Dörken, are back. Alternating between Greek and English, the Dörkens welcome visitors to the Molyvos International Music Festival (MIMF), the event they established – along with their Lesbos-born mother Lito Dakou – in 2014.
The Berlin-based duo are prodigal daughters of Molyvos, the picturesque village that they fill with chamber music every August. Having played piano duets since Kiveli joined big sister Danae at the keyboard (the Theodorakis piece features on their latest album, Apollo & Dionysus, alongside works by Mendelssohn, Brahms and Philip Glass among others), co-creating a festival seemed like a natural step.
‘Working together feels like our superpower,’ says Kiveli. ‘We can accomplish so much more.’ Facing hurdles that have included the European financial crisis, huge numbers of displaced people, a pandemic and sprawling forest fires, two artistic heads proved better than one.
The Kardashians, the Krays... and, of course, the Wonsals
The sisters have reflected contemporary challenges in their programming, from 2016’s ‘Crossroads’ theme to 2023’s ‘Symbiosis’, and are preparing to curate a special tenth edition for 2024. ‘It’s been challenging, but together we can keep going,’ says Danae. ‘No-one knows us better than we do each other,’ adds Kiveli.
While working with a sibling might be an anathema to many (those birth-order tropes can be hard to avoid), there are plenty who have made a success out of it. Polish émigrés the Wonsals went on to establish a leading film studio, under the anglicised version of their name, Warner Bros, and the Kardashians have earned millions from a reality TV series that follows the relationships between the eponymous sisters.
Even in underground activities, it can pay to keep it in the family: the Kray twins are among the UK’s most notorious historic criminals. So, it is unsurprising that when it comes to music, the pattern is repeated. It’s common in rock and pop – from AC/DC to the White Stripes – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, in chamber music, an artform reliant on intimacy.
‘I found the musical siblings I missed as a child’
In Two Violins, One Viola, A Cello and Me, Sonia Simmenauer’s recent memoir about managing string quartets, violist Krzysztof Chorzelski describes his time with the Belcea Quartet as a ‘great stroke of luck’. This was, he writes, because ‘through music, I found the siblings I missed as a child’.
Elder sisters have a distinctive influence over their younger family members during childhood. Shortly after I started playing the flute, my sister took up the clarinet, following me to various wind ensembles – and only years later admitting she hadn’t enjoyed it all that much. Perhaps left to her own devices, she might have found her way to another, more suitable pastime.
‘I wanted to learn the piano so that I could share that space with her'
‘I felt a desire to emulate Danae for many years,’ says Kiveli. ‘I wanted to learn the piano so that I could share that space with her. She never discouraged me.’ Happily, like Danae, Kiveli demonstrated prodigious talent, although she says she always found practising to be a struggle.
‘Danae was more disciplined. The times when I enjoyed practising were when we played together.’ Sometimes it was music for four hands, but often the sisters would just sit together at the stool. ‘Having Danae next to me makes it easier to work,’ says Kiveli.
The Dörkens follow in the footsteps of Katia and Marielle Labèque, the French piano duo with a vast repertoire and discography, which includes 2014 album Sisters. Like the Labèques, the Dörkens live together with their partners and extended family.
Mozart and Nannerl: musical siblings out on tour
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart admired his older sister Maria Anna, known as ‘Nannerl’, who seems to have been the impetus behind his early musical forays. The two children performed together as part of tours organised by their father (one of classical music's pushiest parents). Wolfgang also wrote several pieces for Nannerl to play, including the Prelude and Fugue in C, K394 and the four Preludes K284a.
The siblings drew apart in later years, perhaps due to Nannerl’s enforced retirement from the stage in exchange for marriage, and the separation seems to have been exacerbated by Wolfgang’s marriage to Constanze. But until 1785, Wolfgang sent Nannerl copies of his piano concertos, suggesting the musical bond wasn’t so easily broken.
One sibling relationship has the potential for complication when combined with work pressures. But what happens when multiple brothers and sisters are involved?
What do four musical siblings do? Form a string quartet, of course
The Hagen Quartet, founded by siblings Lukas, Angelika, Veronika and Clemens Hagen, ticked along for several years after it was formed in the 1980s. The siblings conveniently played the right assortment of instruments for a string quartet. Of course, this didn’t happen by chance – their father was first violinist in the Salzburg Mozarteum and encouraged them to play together at home.
The Hagen Quartet’s biography artfully notes that ‘in 1987, Angelika Hagen left the quartet’. (To be replaced by Rainer Schmidt). As the copy also observes, these changes in lineup affect most ensembles – ‘these internal modifications from which few quartets are spared’. Sure, but the stakes are higher when you are related to your colleagues – the ongoing Barclay brothers’ fallout being a case in point in the business world.
When Mozart gently mocked the sibling relationship
Sibling relationships can often seem strange to those who may not have direct or comparable experience of them. The closeness between two sisters is gently mocked in Mozart’s operatic farce Così fan tutte, which sees Fiordiligi and Dorabella get into hot water trying (half-heartedly) to stay faithful to their fiancés.
Dynamics become further muddied when a brother or sister takes on a parental role. This was definitely the case with Johann Christoph Bach, who raised his younger sibling Johann Sebastian Bach when the latter was orphaned at ten years old.
The elder Bach was the organist at St Michael’s Church in Ohrdruf and Johann Sebastian was given organ lessons, as well as learning the basics of organ construction when the instrument was overhauled. It seems this period was important in JS Bach’s development: his Capriccio in E major is dedicated to Johann Christoph.
Sibling success stories
Composer-lyricist team Ira and George Gershwin worked together for much of their careers, writing Broadway scores, popular songs and, with DuBose Heyward, their 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. Some decades later, another set of brothers arrived in Hollywood: Robert and Richard Sherman became staff songwriters for Walt Disney Studios, producing hit soundtracks including Mary Poppins (1964) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
While not regular collaborators, Julian and Andrew Lloyd Webber have sometimes combined forces, notably in 1978 with Variations, Andrew’s piece based on the theme from Paganini’s 24th Caprice, performed by his cellist brother. Julian also recorded Lloyd Webber Plays Lloyd Webber, a 1989 album of arrangements of Andrew’s musical theatre.
Musically, brotherhood has been contemplated in the abstract in Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, and more literally in The Brothers, George Antheil’s chamber opera about Biblical siblings Cain and Abel. And JFK’s role as an absent brother was considered in Irish National Opera’s Least Like The Other (2022). The work explores the life of Rosemary Kennedy, the president’s sister, who was hidden away in an institution after a botched lobotomy.
'Some academics speculate there was romance between brother and sister'
Probably the most famous brother-sister twosome, however, are the Mendelssohns. Felix adored his big sister Fanny and the two developed their prodigious musicality in proximity. In adulthood, as Fanny’s creative life was hampered by the societal expectations of the time, the siblings’ lives remained intertwined; Felix composed large-scale orchestral works, Fanny, with Felix’s encouragement, wrote keyboard pieces and chamber music, and held regular salons.
Fanny died suddenly aged 41 and Felix passed away shortly after, supposedly of heartbreak. The intensity of their relationship, witnessed in correspondence, has even caused some academics to speculate there was romance between brother and sister. In Rethinking Mendelssohn, a collection of essays edited by Benedict Taylor, Angela Mace Christian introduces the concept of ‘siberoticism’, inspired by a letter in which Fanny tells Felix that he exerts a ‘daemonic’ influence over her.
The seven musical siblings who wowed Simon Cowell
At the other end of the scale, the spectacle of large families performing together has long delighted audiences. It draws inevitable comparisons with the Von Trapp Family, a real-life Austrian singing group who inspired The Sound of Music. When the Kanneh-Mason siblings – seven brothers and sisters, all of whom play either violin, piano or cello – appeared on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015, Simon Cowell’s pronouncement was: ‘The fact you’re a family makes this really special.’
The key to success is maintaining separate careers as well as playing together: Kanneh-Mason projects range from an exquisite whole-family recording of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals via the Kanneh-Mason Trio (pianist Isata, violinist Braimah and cellist Sheku) to solo performances.
No-one has better experience of this balancing act than the Bevan family, multiple generations who seem to have isolated the gene for excellent singing voices. The Bevan Family Choir, active in the 1970s, was reformed in 2013 by some of the younger Bevans – including sopranos Sophie and Mary, who were awarded MBEs in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2019.
The Bevan Family Consort (BFC) released its debut recording on Signum last year, including a Magnificat by Dominic Bevan. Their Facebook page profiles each member with characteristic wit: Hugh, for example, is described as ‘the first-born son of Rachel Bevan and John Carter. He selfishly used up most of the good-looking genes in the family so none of the rest of us got a look in.
'We all hate him but we don’t have enough basses in the family, so we need him for the BFC.’ The suggestion is that, ultimately, what musical siblings really need to thrive is a GSOH.