Chick Corea and Friedrich Gulda, The Meeting in Munich

Friedrich Gulda and Chick Corea ... it is fitting that this concert was called, simply, "The Meeting," as this combination of two outstanding veterans must have felt monumental to the audience that night in 1982 at the Munich Summer Piano Festival. Over a 50-year career, Gulda was known as one of the musicians who broke through the barrier between jazz and classical, as renowned for Mozart, Beethoven and Back interpretations as for his forays into jazz from the mid-50s, where he found "the rhythmic drive, the risk, the absolute contrast to the pale, academic approach" he had been taught. Corea was also a pianist who ventured beyond the boundaries of his formative style. The 25 Grammy-winning veteran was a reference point not just in jazz, but in Latin music, fusion and classical interpretation. 

Together, they work up an exquisite set of only a handful of songs, skirting between Miles Davis and Johannes Brahms, while visiting pieces by Frank Churchill, the American composer and film composer known for his soundtracks for Bambi and Snow White as well as Gulda's countryman and peer, the Austrian pianist, Fritz Pauer. A beautiful and subtle marriage of minds that offered endless possibility for intricacy and inventiveness.