Acclaimed Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes's instinct is to let music speak for itself, he tells Arminta Wallace
It's one of those names which nobody seems to be able to say without stumbling over. How, please, should it be done? "Layf Oove Aunts-ness," comes the obliging answer, complete with a slight - but distinct - accent on the "ness" and the gentle, lilting oddness endemic to Norwegian. On paper, of course, the three little words "Leif Ove Andsnes" are anything but odd - especially to anyone who takes a keen interest in piano music. In terms of the contemporary classical music scene, Andsnes is as big as it gets, his name synonymous with sold-out gigs, torrents of critical acclaim and a hat-trick of Gramophone awards.
His press pack is chunkier than a club sandwich and is crammed with reviews, interviews and helpful high-calorie detail: wears Issey Miyake threads on stage, practises on a Yamaha digital piano with headphones, enjoys sushi, lives in a designer pad in Copenhagen. The very model of a modern celebrity.
Thankfully, the pack also contains a copy of his latest CD: which is where the hype stops and the good stuff begins. The fourth in an innovative series of Schubert collaborations between Andsnes and the English tenor Ian Bostridge, it pairs Schubert's final piano sonata - written two months before the composer's death in the autumn of 1828 - with two elegiac songs and a heartbreaking scrap of spoken verse with piano accompaniment. It is one of the most beautiful discs you are likely to hear this, or any other, year.
The second movement of the sonata, in particular, creates an extraordinary atmosphere. The psychologist Stephen Jackson once wrote, in a Classic FM monograph on Schubert, that the piece has "the luminous quality of a waking dream", with its "weightless stillness and . . . atmosphere of suspended half-light". Andsnes delivers these unlikely substances - in spades.
Strange, then, to think that he hasn't listened to the recording himself. At least, not all of it. "I find it completely impossible to listen to my own CDs," he says. "It takes years before I can do it, before I can enjoy some parts of the listening process. I feel very good about the B flat major, but in 20 years you can ask me again - when I have listened to it all. Now, it's just too close." What form does this playback discomfort take? Anger? Frustration? "Oh," he says, "it's just . . . I feel each note physically, and. . . It's just . . ." Then he laughs. "It's a pain," he concludes.
Schubert crops up again in Andsnes's celebrity recital at the National Concert Hall in Dublin tomorrow night. The programme opens with another slice of late Schubert, the ferociously demanding D major sonata; and Andsnes, not generally a man for impassioned outbursts, has been known to declare that he "always knew Schubert would be [ his] great musical love". How? More to the point, perhaps, why? "It was an instinctive feeling," he says. "But it took some time before I felt ready to play him. It's music with so many layers that only in recent years have I felt like he's 'my' composer. The late music of Schubert is music that can never really be played well enough. There's always something to search for. It's elusive in a way in which Beethoven, for example, is not."
It's also, famously, full of shifting perspectives and volatile mood-swings. "Yes. Well, Schubert was 31 years old when he died. I'm already older than him. So even when we talk about his late pieces as mature music which - for example - describes mortality in a way no other composer does, we're still talking about the music of a very, very young man. In the B flat sonata there's this feeling of life on the other side of death, or whatever - but there's also a tremendous feeling of life on earth. The last two movements are full of dances. Party music. The D major sonata is very different. It's a more sunny piece, more optimistic. From a purely virtuosic point of view it's maybe the most difficult of them all, of course. It's very busy, and there's so much happening, but it has to be light. Seamless. Singing in the middle of all this difficulty. That makes this music so great, because it's music that's not just about one thing. It's about many things - like life."
Andsnes grew up on an island off the south-west coast of Norway. His parents were both teachers who specialised in music, and he was experimenting at the piano before he was five. He also played euphonium in the local brass band. He speaks with striking casualness about his first steps at the keyboard. "It looked like fun, so naturally I tried it. In the beginning I was puzzled by the problem of co-ordinating the right and left hand, but suddenly, at the age of six, it clicked. I got it." Indeed, his whole approach to music seems imbued with the sort of cool we think of as intrinsically Nordic.
Even as one of the most white-hot stars in the classical firmament, his attitude to music-making is one of calm practicality. It is, no doubt, fanciful to speak of Andsnes as shedding a peculiarly northern light on things musical; it is, however, noticeable that one of the words which turns up again and again in reviews of his work is "clarity".
"I start," he says of his musical modus operandi, "by working out fingerings. For me, physicality in the playing is terribly important - I mean, technique is not only pushing down the finger, but the musical know-how which goes with it. Which means that everything is technique, in a way. But then when you work on a piece, you discover more and more temporal relationships and colours.
"You also learn a lot on stage. You learn how the piece communicates. In the beginning you have certain ideas, intellectual ideas about the tempi and so on, which have to be absorbed into the subconscious so that it all becomes part of the flow of the music - and it often takes months of experience to really get there. In the end, you have to just trust the music - to let it speak for itself." Andsnes's instinct to let music speak for itself is reflected in his dislike of overly literal programmatic interpretations.
He earned two of his three Gramophone awards for recordings of music by his compatriot Edward Grieg - one for the piano concerto, one for the Lyric Pieces (the other was for Haydn concerti, which only adds to the overall impression of jaw-dropping versatility) - yet Andsnes refuses to subscribe to the stereotypical view of Grieg as a simple, nature-loving Norwegian. Or, as he once - memorably - told an interviewer, "I don't hear any waterfalls in Edward Grieg". On the other hand, for his recital in Dublin he plans to follow the Schubert sonata with a Janacek piece called In The Mist and Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition. Pieces designed, surely, to implant some very specific images in the minds of the audience? "Well, it's not that I want to take that experience away from people," he says. "But for me, it often puts a limit to my listening experience if I have to think that music just portrays one image. For me music is such a rich language in itself that I rarely need those kind of images to experience it. I just need the sounds."
The sounds in the Mussorgsky, he points out, are so amazing that it can speak for itself - loud and clear. And the Janacek? "Oh, it's a wonderful piece. I adore Janacek. I had a Czech teacher who played some for me at one of my first piano lessons, and I completely fell in love with it from the beginning. Actually my first recording for Virgin Classics was piano music by Janacek.
"That was - let's see - 14 years ago. Maybe I should listen to that one now," he muses, with another chuckle.
In June, he's scheduled to record Rachmaninov's first and second concerti with the Berlin Philharmonic and Antonio Pappano. "And in the autumn, I'm going to make a recording of encores - something I've wanted to do for years. Pieces that you never get to record, because they don't fit with the bigger works. Everything from Schubert Impromptus to Mendelssohn Songs Without Words to a Shostakovich polka and a tango by Albeniz." Leif Light, you might say. Like as not, though, it will be as remarkable as everything else he puts his hands to.
