Hélène Grimaud WOODLANDS AND BEYOND... (Video)

WOODLANDS AND BEYOND...

Hélène Grimaud THE MESSENGER

THE MESSENGER

 

DIE KLASSIK-BESTEN

"Klassik-Besten" presents the highlights of the current classical music scene and combines the glamor of big stars with the stars of tomorrow in the starry sky of classical music. The exclusive double CD presents famous melodies - interpreted by outstanding world-class artists. The sexy spectrum ranges from classic top stars like Anna Netrebko and Lang Lang to young stars like Sheku Kanneh-Mason and offers only the best of the best in the classical world: With Cecilia Bartoli, Jonas Kaufmann, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Daniil Trifonov, Andrea Bocelli , David Garrett, Daniel Hope, Joyce DiDonato, Il Divo, Sol Gabetta and many more.

Selected masterpieces invite to sensual experience, immersion and relaxation. In addition to Beethoven's fabulous "Moonlight Sonata" or "Solveig's Song" from the Peer Gynt Suite, the excellent selection features immortal moving melodies, such as the enchanting "Ave Maria" by Bach and Gounod, the famous aria "Nessun dorma" by Puccini or Benny Andersson World Success "Thank You For The Music". Both classical and curious people can discover and enjoy great masterpieces with this high-quality album - a glittering firework of classical music.

Hélène Grimaud MEMORY

Music has been described as a means of rescuing that which is lost – a simple yet persuasive idea and one which informs Hélène Grimaud’s working definition of the art form. The French pianist’s latest Deutsche Grammophon recording addresses music’s unique ability to bring images of the past back to life in the present moment, to conjure up vivid evocations of time and place. Memory, set for release on 28 September 2018, explores the nature of recollection through a series of exquisite pianistic miniatures. Grimaud’s choice of repertoire embraces everything from impressionistic reveries by Chopin and Debussy to the timeless, folk-like melodies of Valentin Silvestrov.

Memory and music make perfect partners. Both are fleeting, never fixed, always subject to interpretation. Our identities are formed from memories, just as so many of our most enduring experiences are rooted in music. Hélène Grimaud wanted to explore the universal nature of memory, its place in the lives of us all. Memory, she explains, uses music to probe the many levels of human consciousness.

“Music peels back the layers of time to reveal the essence of experience,” she observes. “Momentary pain, distress, elation, fades – what remains is sensation. Sensation is the resonance of experience in the space of memory. And it is the space where music resonates within each of us – touching us, moving us, bringing us closer to ourselves. In that way, music can also help remind us that for all in our daily lives that is trivial, there’s a place where meaning is stored. And that it is not forgetfulness that is our burden, but the capacity to reflect and remember that is the wonder of being alive.” The pianist’s eloquent discourse on memory touches both the universal and the particular. It reveals, above all, much about her sensibility for music as a natural process, one shaped in the moment of creation and re-creation by instinct and intuition.

Memory follows in the wake of Grimaud’s Water album, a thought-provoking consideration of the world’s most precious resource. Her latest release complements its predecessor, not least by exploring another condition of life all too easily taken for granted until it begins to disappear.

Grimaud chose compositions that speak directly to memory, creating a programme of works which through their simplicity can bypass the barriers of rational thinking to unlock powerful moods, feelings and sensations. These miniatures are not weighty structures; rather, they possess what she aptly describes as immaterial qualities. Each of the album’s fifteen tracks suggests fleeting impressions of a thought recollected, a dream reimagined, an experience recalled to mind. Memory, she says, “serves to conjure atmospheres of fragile reflection, a mirage of what was – or what could have been”.

Her artistry flourished in the sacred space of the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich’s Sendling  district. The recording venue, a former beer hall converted into a church a century ago, made a lasting impression on her. “The feeling of being alone in a cavernous, resonant space, a building itself constructed as a vessel for spiritual introspection, was immersive,” she recalls. “I am not necessarily a natural colourist yet to be surrounded by resonance – of the notes and between the notes – profoundly changes one’s concept of producing sound. The music must be so transparent as to allow the poetry to shimmer though.”

For composers, memory plays a central role in transmitting influence. Debussy, for instance, absorbed formative lessons from his studies of Chopin and recalled them later in life when composing pieces such as Rêverie and La plus que lente. His musical language also drew impressions from the harmonies of his friend Erik Satie. The points of coincidence emerge clearly in Memory.

Hélène Grimaud highlights the meditative character of works by all three composers, surrounding the heartfelt nostalgia of Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor Op.72 No.1 with a sequence of Satie’s minimalist miniatures, the first of his famous sets of Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies among them. The pianist also spotlights the common ground between two of Silvestrov’s subtle Bagatelles, products of the early 2000s, and Debussy’s beguiling Arabesque No.1 in E major, an early work inspired by the elegant lines and curves of Nature.

Hélène Grimaud compares Valentin Silvestrov’s keyboard miniatures to the image of ‘breathing light’, a poetic metaphor that might easily stand for the haunting impressions left by Memory. (Deutsche Grammophon)

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Zimerman / Andsnes / Grimaud / Boulez BARTÓK Piano Concertos

This is an interesting idea: to combine performances by different pianists and different orchestras. It calls attention to this being Boulez's Bartók . . . Krystian Zimerman takes a direct, hard-hitting approach to the opening Allegro moderator of the First Concerto, in which he is joined by Boulez and the Chicagoans. Every note is crystal clear, and the concerto benefits from Zimerman's stunning pianism and the exquisite brass-playing of this great orchestra . . . Zimerman and Boulez display extraordinary concentration throughout the Andante, and the Allegro molto finale is sheer brilliance . . . The recorded sound is clean and open, keeping both piano and orchestra to the fore. On balance, this is as fine a recording of the First Concerto as any I have heard . . . Hélène Grimaud . . . produces the warmth and gentleness that so many miss in this elegant, comparatively relaxed concerto, which the dying Bartók wrote so that his widow could make a living playing it. Boulez seems totally in synch with Grimaud . . . They attack the finale strongly . . . Revisiting the raison d'être of this disc -- Boulez's Bartók -- it seems entirely appropriate to have three pianists play these three very different concertos . . . three pianists is an equally admirable solution. (Record Review / James H. North, Fanfare (Tenafly, NJ) / 01. July 2005)

 

As this wonderful new CD shows, the mesmerising clarity is still there . . . and there's a welcome flexibility in the rhythm. But the thing that really strikes you is the sheer beauty of the sound . . . And the three soloists - Zimerman, Andsnes and Grimaud - are all marvellous. (Record Review / Ivan Hewett, Times/Eye / 19. February 2005)

Hélène Grimaud PERSPECTIVES

She could be called a Renaissance woman for our times. Hélène Grimaud is not just a deeply passionate and committed musical artist whose pianistic accomplishments play a central role in her life. She is a woman with multiple talents that extend far beyond the instrument she plays with such poetic expression and peerless technical control. The French artist has established herself as a committed wildlife conservationist, a compassionate human rights activist and as a writer.

The word ‘perspective’ has a Latin root that means ‘to look through’. It is a word that readily applies to Hélène Grimaud’s way of making music and conceiving programs. She never plays a piece simply for the sake of playing it. She ‘looks through’ a composition, scrutinizing its components, its implications, its ambiguities, its position within that particular composer’s output, its commonalities with other like-minded works, and its tactile, spiritual and emotional resonances. For Grimaud, this collection is a retrospective offering new perspectives through a very personal choice of repertoire which creates enlightening new echoes between works. From Bach to Rachmaninov, Mozart to Chopin, Grimaud’s own selection of highlights from her albums reflects her artistic journey through the piano’s most famous solo and concerto repertoire in a series of interpretations that never fail to offer new perspectives on even the most familiar music – to be released in April!

Hélène Grimaud WATER

Hélène Grimaud’s latest album for Deutsche Grammophon, produced by Nitin Sawhney, was inspired by her abiding fascination with Nature’s most precious gift. Water is set for worldwide release on January 29, 2016 and conveys imaginative responses to everything from mighty oceans and great lakes to raindrops and snowflakes as well as inviting listeners to contemplate the mounting threats to the safety, security and supply of this essential resource.

“What inspired the idea to record this album is really the fascination that so many composers of the 19th and 20th centuries seem to have had with the element of water,” Grimaud states. Not only did this sow the seed for a recording, it also grew into a collaboration between the pianist and Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon. Their site-specific installation tears become… streams become… was created for the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December 2014. Described by the New York Times as a “compelling, boldly original work”, the project blended elements of art, music and architecture, with Grimaud’s water-themed programme located at its core. Gordon transformed the cavernous Drill Hall by slowly flooding its vast floor to create the impression of what he described as an endless “field of water,” entirely surrounding the grand piano at which Grimaud performed.

The album features works by nine composers: it opens with Berio’s Wasserklavier and includes Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II, Fauré’s Barcarolle No.5, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, “Almería” from Albéniz’s Iberia, Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este and the first movement of Janáček’s In the Mists, before closing with Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie. These myriad reflections on the qualities of water were recorded live at the Armory during the installation and then connected and woven into the album narrative by seven “Transitions” that were newly composed, recorded and produced by Sawhney. Grimaud was delighted to work with the award-winning composer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist, praising his ability to highlight “the universal human dependence on our planet’s most precious resource” and weave “contrasting poetic and philosophical perspectives into a single, cogent musical ecosystem.”

Each piece on this new album unfolds as part of an acoustic “stream”, carefully structured in its blend of classical and contemporary compositions, yet experimental in its overall aesthetic.

Hélène Grimaud is not only one of the world’s most celebrated pianists, but also a tireless champion of ecological causes, having founded the Wolf Conservation Center, which raises awareness of the importance and relationship of these top predators to our ecosystem. With Water, the insightful Grimaud has united her twin passions for music and the environment in unique fashion.

Hélène Grimaud BACH

For Tolstoy, love meant preferring others to oneself. That notion also sheds light on Bach, another of those who, in the deepest sense, entrusted their heart to love. He loved so fully, with all his being, in the most carnal, indeed incarnate way, that his self-effacement has caused us forever to perceive in that something resembling a revelation of life, something that explains his universality: it is as though Bach’s music were the awareness of music itself, its assurance and its promise. Perhaps no one –Shakespeare excepted – was comparably able to transform every atom in the universe, every particle of the world into such profound yet also intimate emotion. Bach is the composer who unites, in their truest sense, the plenary tenderness of prayer with the solitary echo of the divine. He grasps space and makes it an infinite curve; he takes time and makes it a possibility of the future; he seizes a dance and it becomes a betrothal to celebrate. For those of us who see so dimly, he restores a vision: the belief that with Bach there is no limit, that he enjoins us to rediscover that to the full, in this practice of love that has an obligation to the living to expand their lives, to restore love to the epicenter of their hearts. There is no longer any dispute over the urgency of our situation today. But one would be mistaken in regarding Bach as no more than a man of his time bearing witness to ours – because Bach is always in the process of becoming. Even in his own lifetime, he eluded his contemporaries who saw in him a relic of the past, not a prophet for all times and all people. What could then be more natural than to find him at the source of Liszt, Busoni or Rachmaninov? Bach was such an island in the middle of the river, free and unwavering in the midst of the currents and counter-currents, fed from the shore of the source and carried to the shore of hope. Between these two markers is a symbolic path which is the signature of all existence. Bach was not at all torn: he knew how to build bridges. He is always showing us, in a flash of transparent clarity, how to reconcile the pain in our days with the burst of light. (Hélène Grimaud)

Hélène Grimaud / Esa-Pekka Salonen CREDO

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy op. 80
The piano's crashing opening chords herald what seems for the first three minutes like a solo work. Then comes a tentative dialogue with the lower strings, after which - equally tentatively - the woodwind enter. Human voices arrive almost as an afterthought. This was a fantasy indeed, written at such speed that the musicians got their parts with the ink wet. As the piano reworks the simple musical ideas on which the whole edifice is based, we get a strong whiff of what Beethoven's celebrated improvisations must have been like. In 1808 he'd earned little, and his friends encouraged him to put on a four-hour concert of his own works in order to refill his coffers. But this late addition was no mere space-filler: bringing order out of chaos, moving from darkness to light, and prefiguring the final theme of his Ninth Symphony, it reflects Beethoven's genius at full tilt. 

Beethoven: Sonata in D minor, op. 31 no. 2 "The Tempest"
Beethoven himself didn't give this work its name - according to his early biographer Schindler, the composer declared that the work could be understood by reading Shakespeare's play - but from the moment the first theme breaks free from the cavernous opening chord, it certainly is tempestuous. That chord seems to pose a question, to which - after a long journey through darkly dramatic landscapes - the last notes come like an answer. This sonata was one of three composed in the village of Heiligenstadt in 1802, at a time when Beethoven was growing deaf, and in near-suicidal despair. Here he was at his most heroic: on the one hand, his "Heiligenstadt Testament" confided his woes to posterity (while concealing them from his contemporaries); on the other, he was creating masterpieces of coiled energy like this. 

John Corigliano: Fantasia on an Ostinato
As one of the American composers finding a way forward without abjuring tonality, Corigliano is blazing a fascinating trail. In this work from 1985 his aim has been "to combine the attractive aspects of minimalism with a convincing structure and emotional expression". The foundation is the famous theme of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, with Corigliano exploiting the repeated rhythmic motive as well as the harmonic pattern. (Michael Church)

Music is about emotional communication. Give it a try, and don't think you have taken the wrong road when perhaps you just have not gone far enough. After all, what is to come does not need to be discovered so much as invented. (Hélène Grimaud)

Lisa Batiashvili ECHOES OF TIME

The sound of Shostakovich belongs to Lisa Batiashvili’s earliest memories. During her childhood, she often heard her father’s string quartet rehearse Shostakovich’s music, and at home and in concert his was the sound world which shaped her sense of cultural context. Lisa Batiashvili and her family left their Georgian homeland when she was eleven years old, but the music of Shostakovich travelled with them. Mark Lubotsky, her teacher in Hamburg, was a student of David Oistrakh, for whom Shostakovich wrote his violin concertos, and to the young Lisa Batiashvili, this felt like a direct line to the source. “When my teacher started telling stories about the First Violin Concerto, I completely fell in love with this piece. David Oistrakh had shared very emotional and precise information about every movement. Somehow the piece became symbolic of the time in the Soviet Union, which I had also experienced myself during the first ten years of my life. Musicians during Soviet times were also looking for the freedom that Shostakovich sought through his music. Music was an escape and a symbol of freedom at a time when it was so difficult to function in an incredibly brutal system. When I travelled to Moscow with my parents, we met many people, and I had a strong feeling that this music was a mirror of what they were going through.” So her debut recording for Deutsche Grammophon has Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto at its core. Under the title Echoes of Time, Lisa Batiashvili has assembled a collection of works which all cast light on Soviet Russia.

Her native Georgia is represented through Giya Kancheli’s haunting V & V, a small taste of a sound world which is markedly different from, yet somehow connected to, that of its massive northern neighbour. “Georgian people are actually not at all related to Russians”, explains Lisa Batiashvili. “In terms of climate, Georgia is a southern country, and the people are more like southern Italians or Greeks by nature – very alive, incredibly emotional and spontaneous. You have the mountains and the sea and great weather for eight months of the year. Russia is vast and lonely and full of isolated places, whereas Georgia is compact and everything is kind of burning. Of course, I cannot avoid sounding Georgian when I play. I spent my childhood there, and when you are in Georgia, you feel something very intense. It’s in my genes and in my veins, even if I’ve spent more than 20 years now in Europe.”

In 1994, Lisa Batiashvili and her family moved to Munich, where she stayed for 15 years. Since then she and her oboist husband have moved to France with their children, but the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra still feels like family. “It’s very special to record with them, because during my time in Munich I got to know three quarters of the orchestra personally”, she says. “I have friends in the orchestra and also colleagues with whom I play chamber orchestra. Recording with them was one of the most wonderful personal experiences – quite apart from the fact that this is one of the most fantastic orchestras in the world, with a tradition like few others.”

Through her spectacular win in the Sibelius Competition at the age of 16 and subsequent visits to Finland, Lisa Batiashvili also feels a cultural affinity with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. “When we began the first rehearsal of the Shostakovich, it already felt as if we had played together millions of times. With Esa-Pekka, everything seems so easy and natural. Everything falls immediately into place. He has amazing intuition.” And this recording also brought the long-awaited chance to work with pianist Hélène Grimaud, for Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise. “We’ve been planning for years to play together. She loves this kind of repertoire. I admire her a lot, not only for her musicianship, but also as a person who is an incredibly serious musician.” While Pärt and Kancheli, like Shostakovich, both felt the weight of Soviet oppression, Rachmaninov’s music expresses a nostalgic yearning for his homeland that Lisa Batiashvili feels fits well with the other works on the recording. It balances the sweetness of Shostakovich’s Lyrical Waltz, written for the piano and arranged for violin and orchestra by her father, with echoes of another age, she says.

Germany, Finland, Georgia, Moscow, France – in the course of our conversation, Lisa Batiashvili has mentioned a surprising number of places which are almost, but not quite, home. “It has happened quite often over the past fifteen years that I was not really sure where I belonged”, she agrees. “Germany felt so different from my own country when I first arrived there. But when I went back to Georgia I found I didn’t understand anymore who I was or where I belonged. And at the same time I didn’t really integrate fully with the German way of life, I felt like a guest everywhere. On the other hand, for musicians it is a huge advantage to be able to make their home wherever they go. I have a French husband now, our children were born in Germany, and I no longer feel uncomfortable about this way of life. When you bring music to the whole world, it is important to have an easy connection to all kinds of people. And then, in the end, you are not really a stranger anywhere anymore.”

(Shirley Apthorp)

Hélène Grimaud RESONANCES

“I was eleven and could play perhaps the first page and a half. I’d no idea what the piece was about, but what I could read and play fascinated me,” Hélène Grimaud describes her early contact with the piece that is central to the present release, a piece she first encountered when she was still practically a child. “Alban Berg’s sonata”, she continues, “was the starting point for a programme that seems to trace an arbitrary line through the history of music.” And yet she identifies subtle links that take her on a geographical journey through the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, although she admits that “Mozart’s Salzburg did not officially belong to Austria, and Bartók would have strongly resisted this act of appropriation. But somehow Mozart’s music anticipates much that later returns in the music of Austro-Hungary, in Liszt and even in Berg, where it comes to full fruition.”
Resonances can be identified. Echoes and pre-echoes, fascinating historical links that come together in Berg’s sonata. The Op. 1 of the Viennese master of atonality is nominally in B minor, but it already explores the very limits of tonality. It serves as the conceptual starting point and effective culmination of the musical journey that Hélène Grimaud under­takes with her listeners. And all roads lead to the harmonic and thematic distillation that Schoenberg’s pupil achieved with this “apprentice piece” of his: Berg’s sonata concentrates in a single movement everything that constitutes a Classical sonata movement and does so, moreover, in the simplest manner imaginable.
But the architectural rigour – an “echo” of the Classical structure that Berg learnt from his teacher – goes hand in hand with a wealth of ideas and an emotional openness that are rarely found in music of the early modern period, a period that reaches its first real high point in this work.
“One assumes that a piece with the opus number one”, says Hélène Grimaud, “must be an early work, but the truth is that Berg’s sonata is the perfect incarnation of what he could bring to the world. It’s an extreme expression of something that seems to come from the soul, involving no calculation and yet resulting in a piece of an unfathomabbly lucid structure.”
It was in 2009 that Hélène Grimaud rediscovered the copy of the score that she had retained from her childhood like some oddly fascinating treasure. Now an internationally acclaimed pianist, she re-read the piece that had once seemed so mysterious and that her teacher Pierre Barbizet had filled with many colourful notes and an affectionate “list of contents” stuck to the front endpapers. It was now revealed with the immediacy of a dramatic scene from a Romantic opera. “It’s a music drama cast in the miniature form of a single-movement sonata,” says the pianist.
This brings us neatly on to the only piano sonata by that sorcerer among Romantic pianists, a work that is likewise in B minor: “Franz Liszt too wrote a single-movement sonata,” says Hélène Grimaud, “albeit on a vast – let’s admit it, ‘Wagnerian’ – scale. From a structural point of view, the movements of a multi-sectional sonata in first-movement sonata form, with exposition, development section, recapitulation and coda, have merged together. Once again we have echoes of something that is familiar, but redefined and reordered and concentrated in one vast formal structure. And once again the question isn’t that of the composer’s mastery in erecting such a complex edifice. The fact that Liszt is in total control of the musical structure says nothing about the equally highly developed mastery of expression. The result is a music drama guided by the possibilities of the piano, a sonata that is as theatrical as a sonata can be, operatic in an instrumental sense. Let’s not forget the musico-historical component: Wagner wouldn’t have written his operas if Liszt hadn’t existed. At least not in the way he wrote them.”
With the Liszt Sonata the pianist becomes a stage director, a role she sees as an artistic challenge. “Historically speaking, this leads us back to Mozart. He too writes operatic scenes for his instrument, giving it recitatives and arias to sing. He extracts everything from the possibilities of the piano. In terms of his period – and this links him to Liszt and Berg – he’s an extremist in matters of expression, a point that made him so interesting to Beethoven: the middle movements of Mozart’s A minor Sonata and Beethoven’s Sonata op. 31 no. 2 (‘The Tempest’) are as related as any brother and sister. Mozart’s sonata teems with things that were to come later; and it speaks a subjective language.”
The music of Béla Bartók strikes us like that of Liszt and Berg, only in a different way, for he tried to define the linguistic element in music even more concretely than his predecessors. Not only within the confines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also after its collapse, he set out in search of true folk music, the authentic language of human beings, and made it the source of his inspiration. It appears in works such as the Romanian Folk Dances not as an echo but as something direct and undistorted. At the end of our musical journey to eastern Europe, we find ourselves listening more closely than ever to the most immediate expression of people singing and dancing, at the point where the expression of the subject is again subsumed by the collective understanding.
(Hélène Grimaud was talking to Wilhelm Sinkovicz)

Hélène Grimaud / Claudio Abbado A RUSSIAN NIGHT (RACHMANINOV Piano Concerto No. 2 / TCHAIKOVSKY The Tempest / STRAVINSKY The Firebird)

When Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, he feels, by his own admission, to be “among old friends" and has “the special sense of being back home". This familiarity is due above all to his close links with Lucerne, for it was here that he chose to revive the idea of an elite orchestra similar to the one formed by Arturo Toscanini for Lucerne Festival in 1938. The result was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that Abbado helped to establish in 2003, drawing on a select band of hand-picked musicians and realizing his vision of an orchestra close to his ideal of an enlarged chamber ensemble: the nucleus of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which is complemented by members of other international orchestras and by outstanding chamber musicians, with soloists of the calibre of Sabine Meyer, Wolfram Christ, Clemens Hagen and Reinhold Friedrich on the front desks. The orchestra's concertmaster (leader), Kolja Blacher, has sought to account for the uniqueness of an ensemble which, under its artistic director Claudio Abbado, is characterized by friendship and respect: “What is so special about our orchestra? We don't have to play together, we want to!"

During the summer of 2008 Claudio Abbado conducted a concert with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that threw light on various facets of Russian life and music. Two works - Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasia inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest and Stravinsky's concert suite from his fairytale ballet The Firebird - depict the dramatic struggle between the forces of good and evil and the ultimate triumph of the former. And Hélène Grimaud was the soloist in a performance of one of the classics of the late Romantic repertoire, Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.

Rachmaninov's piano works have long featured in Hélène Grimaud's repertory. She devoted her very first recording to solo works of the Russian composer in July 1985, and his Second Piano Concerto of 1900­01 was the work with which she made her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Claudio Abbado in 1995. Since then this dark, soulful and “most Russian" of Rachmaninov's works has continued to haunt her: “It was love at first sight," Hélène Grimaud enthuses, even today. “Afterwards, it's true, I rather neglected the work, but that neglect was intentional because at one time I played it often." Today, however, the Second Piano Concerto again accompanies the pianist on her concert tours all over the world: “It's a work that is noble, pure and of very harmonious proportions, but it also involves a certain risk, because you must stay focused on the structure of the piece, on the line, and on the overarching form."

For Hélène Grimaud, to rehearse the concerto with Claudio Abbado at Lucerne Festival in August 2008 was, as she put it, “a dream". For her, the conductor is “a man of great depth and kindness, yet he also has a very special aura to him". His love of the music, the pianist goes on, communicates itself to the players and audience and fosters a wordless agreement between conductor and soloist. “You really don't need to speak or to translate an emotion or a sentiment into words", because Abbado himself already expresses all that is necessary. “You can read it all in his glance, in his face. There's a great clarity about it all, the way in which he conducts and his intentions are absolutely clear". It was also a stroke of good luck for Hélène Grimaud to work with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, “an orchestra that has a magnificent commitment to the music, one that has density and lightness at the same time". In this way, “pure music" could be produced in an atmosphere far removed from the usual routine of rehearsals. Perhaps it was the intensity of her work with Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that ultimately helped Hélène Grimaud to approach the concerto afresh: “The piece continues to develop within you, even when you're not actively involved with it, so that when you return to it, it has clearly become a completely different work. That is always fascinating but sometimes more complex than developing a new relationship with a new piece."

The extent to which vivid characterization depends on orchestral playing that is alert, vital and at the same time subtly balanced with chamber-like translucency is clear from the three characters that inhabit Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasia, The Tempest: the radiant lovers Miranda and Ferdinand and the monster of the darkness, Caliban. When the composer's patron, Nadezhda von Meck, first heard the work, which had received its triumphant first performance at a Russian Music Society concert in Moscow on 19 December 1873, she summed up its impact on her as “magnificent sounds, capable of filling the whole world and affording a person happiness, enjoyment and delight". With its atmospheric reminiscences of Wagner, its thrilling account of the sea and the storm and its lyrical love themes, The Tempest was long regarded as Tchaikovsky's best-loved concert work.

But the most striking demonstration of an orchestra casting aside all sense of routine was afforded by the final piece in Claudio Abbado's Russian programme, Stravinsky's The Firebird, a score that made its composer famous overnight when it was unveiled in Paris on 25 June 1910. Lucerne's listeners were regaled with pianissimos that grew more intense, the quieter they became. No less impressive were the subtlest transitions and shadings, which none the less emerged with the most thrilling sense of drama. For the performance in Lucerne, Claudio Abbado opted for a composite version of the score, taking over the sequence of movements from the second, five-movement concert suite of 1919 but eschewing the reduced orchestra of twenty players that Stravinsky, taking account of post-war shortages, envisaged for this second suite. With its sumptuous forces, this performance was entirely in the spirit of the programme as a whole: firmly rooted in the Russian tradition - after all, Stravinsky originally wrote the piece for the famous Ballets Russes. But the forces of good and evil confront one another in richly colourful and exotic sounds, forces embodied, on the one hand, by the young Prince Ivan, whom the liberated Firebird helps with a miraculous feather, and, on the other, by Kashchei, the prince of Hell. But perhaps Claudio Abbado's decision to opt for the full orchestral version was motivated simply by his desire to feel “among old friends". 

(Susanne Schmerda)

Hélène Grimaud BEETHOVEN Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" / Piano Sonata No. 28

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud is one of the most sagacious of today's keyboard artists - a philosopher at the concert grand. Now she has taken on one of the greatest works of the piano literature, Beethoven's “Emperor" Concerto. The result is a major event. Without pathos Grimaud delivers the contemporary update on a classic. She gives you thoughts, reflections and ideas instead of blood, sweat and tears. And yet the last piano concerto of the Bonn master, in her hands, is a work of musical extremes, a journey of the soul through the vales of worldly despair and over the peaks of ideologies. A musical journey to a world viewed from a melancholic interior, time-travelling from Beethoven's to ours. She makes music into one of the great struggles of our time.

Sound for Hélène Grimaud is space for thought - a place where everything is possible. It also means taking the world apart in order to put it back together in a new form. And that's precisely what she does, while remaining true to her idol Ludwig van Beethoven. There is no composer who described the current zeitgeist better than he did, none who went as far in extending existing formal boundaries in order to describe the struggle between the individual and the world order.
 Following a concert, the musician explains why the composer is one of her heroes: “He had to struggle with the problem of living at a time of discord, riven with disruption and contradiction. Truths that held one day were already passé the next. But none of that prevented Beethoven, ill, nearly deaf, from holding fast to his musical universalism. He was ready to overturn old forms and conventions in order to find new ones. It was not the world that was 'out of joint', but the language used to make sense of it." For Grimaud, this is the real challenge of Beethoven for our time: the doubting individual views a world gone awry. To bring it back under control Beethoven needed music.

“One can hear the struggle in Beethoven's compositions, his wrestling with every note, with every chord. He conceived the world in a way that I find absolutely contemporary, not to say modern. We too live in a world that we can hardly comprehend, one in which confusion exceeds our grasp of its overriding complexities. We too are desperately longing to give form to this world. Beethoven showed us that working to repair the fissures and flaws in human existence can result in beautiful music. He strove for a heaven on earth. He was always prepared to stand the world on its head."

For a long time, Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto was interpreted as a heroic battle painting. Of course, Grimaud also hears galloping horses and the carnage of battle in the “Emperor" Concerto, and of course it also represents for her a piece of contemporary history - not a historical illustration of the past but rather of “philosophy cast in music, a philosophy that sets out to neutralize human contradictions". And this calls for a show of strength.
“Beethoven is one of the most fascinating of all period-spanning composers", says Grimaud. “Of course he was formed by the classical figures of the Viennese School, he not only brought their ideas to culmination, especially in the Fifth Piano Concerto, but also broke new ground." This development can also be heard in the Sonata op. 101, dedicated to Beethoven's pupil Dorothea von Ertmann, which Grimaud has chosen to complement the concerto.

Beethoven in his symphonies and piano concertos has fused the private with the political, the internal with the external, and it is this individualized, almost literary view of the single human being in the world that fascinates the pianist: “When you read Beethoven's letters, you get to know someone with misanthropic tendencies, who often reacted brusquely and rudely, who was easily disillusioned and offended by others - but, at the same time, in his sensibility, developed an incredible strength. Even as questionable as Beethoven's behaviour may at times have seemed, he firmly believed that things could also be different - that they could be better. His music is marked by these assertions and disappointments, and by an endless sense of hope. He formulated the ambivalence of every individual - and because of that Beethoven's music reaches us."

Something genuinely new in her Beethoven interpretations is Grimaud's handling of the composer's effects, which for her are never an end in themselves but extreme pronouncements: “I think that the real idea of Beethoven's music is found where the extremes collide", she says. “It's not about hollow pathos or empty, unquestioningly marching heroism, not about misanthropic melancholy or a concomitant world-weariness." Grimaud in her interpretations prefers to listen for the overtones, to expound theses in order immediately to develop antitheses.

Monumentality in her playing is entirely subjugated to the search for meaning. “The piano concerto is like a beast", says Grimaud, “for whom one has incredible respect. You study it - and in the end this beast reveals itself as a teacher. As a teacher who challenges you to consider things for yourself, who, through the overwhelming form the interpreter has to deal with, forces one to reflect on one's own contradictions and bring them into an individual form - to transcend one's own limits and toss old preconceptions overboard. Beethoven compels the artist to acquire knowledge, because in his music the emotional is developed out of philosophical logic. With emotion alone, one doesn't get very far."
 When you hear Grimaud's “Emperor", the work's heroic attributes take on a new significance. For this pianist, heroes aren't found on the battlefield. Her heroes attempt to bring order to the world as they find it. To save the world, they call themselves into question. Grimaud's new Beethoven also represents the birth of a wise new hero.

Hélène Grimaud BRAHMS Concertos

 With a nod of recognition to the composer – who himself let twenty-two years go by after completing his First Piano Concerto before starting on the Second – Hélène Grimaud notes that she’s needed every bit of the fifteen years that have passed since she recorded Brahms’s First to prepare herself for recording No.2. The explanation behind the sheer length of this musical journey lies in the particularly close relationship she enjoys with the D minor Concerto which, among other things, was the first work by Brahms she ever heard. Grimaud can still clearly recall that discovery, though her feelings about it are hard to put into words: “It’s something that completely consumes you, leaving no room for anything else at all – a new universe opens up to you and you just dive right in without a second thought.”

To her, the Concerto represents life itself, our very existence: “You land right in the heart of the action of that existence and there’s no turning back”. She acknowledges that it’s a work she needs, both physically and mentally, highlighting the unadorned, uncompromising side of its nature: “It gives the impression of having been written at one sitting, even though we know that’s not the case”. With reference to the second movement, dedicated to Clara Schumann, Grimaud pinpoints one impassioned, almost prayer-like moment, which has to be played with both intellectual and emotional honesty if the truth of the work is to be brought out: “You can only truly touch an audience if you play with sincerity. Even then, there’s no guarantee, given that we all perceive things in different ways. No single performance can touch every member of an audience in exactly the same way, but at the very least that basic parameter of sincerity has to be present.”

Her relationship with the Second Piano Concerto, meanwhile, is more complex, and somewhat paradoxical. For a long time it seemed less vital to her than the First. She felt its finale, however sublime, was surplus to requirements. “If many people prefer the Second, that’s perhaps because of its intensity of expression. It looks at what life has been, what it is and what it could have been. There’s a kind of nostalgia there, as well as a slightly bitter strain of tenderness.”

Even so, the idea of never broaching the work was unthinkable. She couldn’t imagine going through life without it – because of her relationship with Brahms, an affinity dating back to her childhood. His music gives her a sense of intimacy that she simply accepts, without attempting to explain or justify it in any way.

She began work on the B flat Concerto in 2007, but it took time for her to feel completely at home with it, as she herself recalls: “I was very wary of it. It was as if I were observing both the work and myself in relation to it. There was a distance between us that wasn’t conducive to a truly successful outcome. I learned it, performed it twice, then said to myself, ‘well, mission accomplished, that’s enough for now’.”

Another five years went by before she felt irresistibly drawn to go back to the Second Concerto, and this time to embrace it fully, without reservations. And as she embarked on this new relationship, she also began to feel a similar urge to revisit the First. The thought of one without the other, of recording the Second without the First resurfacing, had become inconceivable.

And so this album project took shape. Grimaud is keen to point out, however, that she did not deliberately set out to reinterpret Concerto No.1: “That’s not the way I work. As you evolve, as you experience certain things, you filter a familiar piece of music t

hrough your new experiences and encounters. In some ways your interpretation changes, in others it stays the same. It’s the idea of reconciling opposites.”

She recorded Concerto No.1 with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and No.2 with the Vienna Philharmonic – her first recording with this prestigious orchestra – both led by Andris Nelsons, a conductor she greatly admires, and with whom she has a strong fellow-feeling. She pays him tribute, saying, “You sense that musicians would do anything for him. I spoke earlier about the essential role played by intellectual honesty when you’re performing, and that’s true here as well. There’s a purity about him which I think inspires a different reaction from his musicians … He has intensity, musical intelligence and a sense of freedom, but there’s also something that emanates from him which has to do with instinct and that purity of intent – and it makes you want to give your all.”

(Jean-Michel Dhuez)