Classical
Andras Schiff got up the nose of Le Monde during the 1997 Salzburg Festival. First it was sartorial. "His dress is old-fashioned, the revers of his lapels are in black velvet, a watch chain completes the ensemble." Then personal. The Hungarian "poses as a personage, a great master of the piano". And finally it was musical. "The left hand disappears in a halo of pedal, the tempo shifts, the right hand sounds too loudly . . . "
Edinburgh Festival audiences will have the chance to umpire. Is Schiff the personable, unassuming guide to the Austro-German musical tradition we have always taken him to be? Or does he play too loud? At the Usher Hall the pianist will play, probably quite delicately, the six Bach Partitas. The week after he will perform and direct from the piano, in something of a feat, four Mozart piano concertos plus the Quintet for Piano and Winds before doing something similar but entirely different a couple of nights later. The French critic sighs predictably. Schiff is "insatiable", he has already written. He is a "bulimic" of the piano.
Prolific, certainly. This year already, a selection of releases includes chamber music by Dvorak, duets by Mozart, Reger and Busoni, even an entire disc of polkas by the Romantic Czech nationalist Bedrich Smetana. Schiff has always been seduced by the pretty and shied away from the profound: his Beethoven concertos never did quite hit the mark. But in these rarely heard Bohemian dances the rise and fall and curve of the musical line is intoxicating. Melody, as always with this pianist, is paramount. Tempos are speeded up and slowed down, liberties given here and taken there. Schiff is the kind of pianist teachers advise pupils not to imitate. There was a time when most pianists played this way; but the face of history has frowned on the flexible rubato of old.
Or perhaps only the lesser modernists worshipped the fetish of rigidity. Schiff identifies his musical ideal in the recordings of the great Hungarian composer and modernist Bela Bartok. "My millions of instructions are not meant for people like you," Bartok told the pianist's teacher: know your onions and you can play how you like. Bartok, despite the appearance of his scores, peppered with admonitions, injunctions and directions, was a pianist of free individuality, lyrical but never sentimental. "When we are taught in classical music four semiquavers must be played absolutely equally then we are far removed from the truth," Schiff has said. His Bartok concertos, with their interplay of rapturous, folk-inspired dance and otherworldly introspection, are among his finest achievements.
The French critic was unjust to compare Schiff with Richter, no doubt Schiff's superior in technique. The Russian and the Hungarian are different kinds of musician. Schiff hosts charming documentaries on BBC TV, founds intimate chamber festivals in the Austrian Alps and has no aspiration to be a lion of keyboard. "I believe in art and in spirit," he has said. His model is Pablo Casals, the great cellist who played Bach, as Schiff does, for his spiritual breakfast and who was, in the best sense, a great musical amateur.
Perhaps Schiff can sound, at times, amateur in the less than best sense. The art of interpretation lies in knowing how not to play what is written, Casals once said, and in a disc of Schumann last year, the nocturnal magic that the composer envisaged in his Nachtstucke, op 23, remained disappointingly locked away. The detail on the page of Schumann's "Nocturnal Banquet", the third of the miniatures - melody emerging mistily from a wash of arpeggios, staccato notes jumping the barlines cheekily underneath - lay alchemically untransformed. In the Italian Concerto of Bach, recorded 15 years previously, Schiff's habitual delight in shifting textures, playful downsizings, the tiptoe staccato are curiously absent.
But then, suddenly, one can only smile. In the 18th of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the left-hand line dips an octave below its written pitch: the sound of a huskily grumbling Steinway has an intoxicating magic all its own. Whimsically the pianist transposes the right hand in the next variation to the octave above its written pitch. The effect is witty and charming, but it is the kind of music-box trickery calculated to raise hackles in the pages of Gramophone.
Schiff's detractors perhaps believe, in the outdated modern way, that music should be preserved from the blemish of personality. All personality, that is, except the composer's. But Schiff and the increasing number of performers like him - the pianist Till Fellner, inspired young pupil of Alfred Brendel, will be another piano highlight in Edinburgh - know that the performer's personality is indispensable. To guide us between the extreme impasses that Richter's brilliance and Glenn Gould's asceticism have led to at their extremes, Andras Schiff remains a necessary musician.
Andras Schiff plays Bach at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on 23 and 24 August, and Mozart on 30 August and 1 September (Festival box office: 0131-473 2000)
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