Two local pianists share a nationality, age, armloads of domestic and international awards, a noted teacher and, soon, an Artis—Naples stage.

Quang Vo and Duy Vu, both 18, are scholarship students of Professor Michael Baron, head of keyboard studies at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Bower School of Music.

Vu was recently awarded the special Chopin Award for the state of Florida. And, together, Vo and Vu took state and regional honors in the Music Teachers National Association piano duet competition.

But to imply that they are in any way the same would do them as much of a disservice as describing the piano’s versatility as a single sort of sound.

Vo is a polymath who not only speaks five languages but is also an accomplished violinist and cellist. Vu has secured not only musical awards but also gold medals in karate — a pursuit he willingly sacrificed to spare his hands for the keyboard.

“I’d been to a number of their performances at FGCU,” said pianist Konstantin Soukhovetski, the Grand Piano Series’ director of education and community engagement. “I found their technical ability and musical maturity remarkable. And of course, creating opportunities for young music students like them aligns with Grand Piano Series’ educational mission so well.”

The third and last in this summer’s series of Narrative Musicales — “Water or Steel, Contradictions of Piano Sound” — is another hour-long, intermission-less concert that intertwines the music with Soukhovetski’s reflections on it.

From the young pianists’ repertoire, Soukhovetski selected pieces that would not only entertain the audience with their virtuosity. The program also book-ends and spans the spectrum of pianistic sound, much of it as challenging as Ravel’s impressionistic but diabolically difficult Scarbo.

The concert runs the gamut from the liquid trills and rocking rhythms of Chopin’s Barcarolle (gondolier’s song) through the blended blue notes and melody of Florence Price’s Fantasie nègre. It shows off the piano’s percussive muscularity in toccatas as different as Kapustin’s jazzy romp and Prokofiev’s fiendishly motoric showpiece.

Bonus points, at the end, for recognizing the work of Soukhovetski’s colleague and friend Greg Anderson, who arranged Khatchaturian’s swirling Sabre Dance as a keyboard pounding, pell-mell modern duet.

By the end of the hour, the audience will exclaim, “Oh my God! How did they get the piano to do all that?”

Founded in 2016 by Milana Strezeva and Raniero Tazzi, Grand Piano Series (grandpianoseries.org) is a nonprofit concert and education organization that seeks to enrich the cultural life of the Southwest Florida community with memorable concerts by international artists of the highest caliber, along with a dynamic program of community outreach for all ages, including programs for over 6,000 students each year in Collier and Lee County schools. ¦