The duo

Davide and Daniele Trivella are twin brothers from Bergamo who have played together since they were ten: four hands at one keyboard, and on two pianos.

They graduated in Bergamo, where they studied with Guido Legramanti and then with Alberto Colombo. They went on to work with Pier Narciso Masi at the Accademia Musicale in Florence, Katia Labèque at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Alfons Kontarsky at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and with Alexander Lonquich, Bruno Canino and Thérèse Dussaut.

In the 1990s they won thirteen first prizes in national and international competitions, among them the Concours Claude Kahn in Paris, the Chopin Prize and the International Music Tournament in Rome, the Kawai Trophy and Sanremo Classico. In 1999 they won the gold medal at the Murray Dranoff International Two Piano Competition in Miami, the leading competition for piano duos, together with a special prize for the four-hands repertoire.

They have since performed in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, England and Luxembourg, in the United States, Russia, Israel, South Africa and Thailand: at the Gasteig and the Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Cape Classic Festival, the Warwick International Festival, and in Bangkok with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra in Mozart's Concerto K 365. In 2000, at the Venice Biennale, they performed Schoenberg transcriptions with Pierre-Laurent Aimard. In 2015 they returned to Miami to play two-piano works by John Adams, John Corigliano, Lowell Liebermann, Alice Ping Yee Ho and Gabriela Lena Frank at the New World Center. They have performed for RAI, Bayern 4, Radio France and Radio Israel.

Their repertoire runs from the eighteenth century to music written today. Alongside the core duo literature they play Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen, Hindemith's sonatas, Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces op. 16 in Webern's version, Stravinsky and Ligeti's Monument, and music by Gershwin, Piazzolla, Gianluigi Trovesi and Giovanni Sollima, which they often arrange for their own forces. They gave the world premieres of Ernesto Rubin de Cervin's Offerte and L'ultimo corale.

On stage the duo is easy to recognise: two pianos placed back to back or at a right angle, a change of instrument in the middle of a piece, plucked strings and the piano case used as percussion. They also write their own music for two pianos, collected in the two volumes of Some Rain.

They have recorded for Phoenix Classics, Egea, Urania Records and Brilliant Classics, and their performances at the Brescia and Bergamo International Piano Festival were released as a CD and book by Lubrina. In 2026 Brilliant Classics released their complete recording of Max Reger's original works for piano four hands.

In 2020 they founded the 4Hands Piano Festival in Bergamo, devoted to music for four hands and two pianos, at the Teatro Sant'Andrea in the old town. In recent years they have taken a programme devoted to Simon Mayr, the Bavarian-born composer who lived in Bergamo, to Germany, and have built concerts around the books of writers such as Jan Brokken and Pablo d'Ors.