Beethoven not top of his Liszt

In conversation, Miceal O'Rourke comes across as the most relaxed and affable of individuals

In conversation, Miceal O'Rourke comes across as the most relaxed and affable of individuals. But there are occasional moments when he gives a hint of other facets of his character. He mentions a computer installation problem that, he says, made his blood boil. And you can almost feel the temperature rise as he talks about it. He talks about the moment when he had to make a choice about the place of piano playing in his life. He was only 11, and one of the other passions in his life was sport, particularly hurling. The decision in favour of the piano seems to have been made with an immediacy that only grit and determination could guarantee. "I just knew I wanted to play the piano on a full-time basis - and did, practically, at that time, right throughout school. For me, school was something that got in the way of playing the piano. It was a pain in the neck, to the extent that I did the Leaving Cert one year after Inter, so as to get out, so as to be able to study piano."

If he has fond memories of his student days in the 1960s, they don't relate to the opportunities afforded a young musician in the Ireland of the times. He recalls with amusement a Dublin appearance by the great pianist, Artur Rubinstein, which, though he doesn't make this point himself, seems somehow to epitomise the place of music in Irish society at the time. Rubinstein played in the old Adelphi Cinema, beginning his programme, O'Rourke recalls, with Schubert's late Sonata in B flat. At the end of the long first movement, the spotlights came on, picking out the girls with the ice-cream trays at the front of the auditorium. "People were clambering out, and the look of amusement on Rubinstein's face was incredible. He threw away the rest of the concert, thinking, `This is not serious'. Up to that point he had been as on he could be."

So it was hardly surprising that O'Rourke didn't hang around in Ireland. He got married, within a couple of days of finishing college (a music degree at UCD), and a few days after that he was gone. He settled in Paris, where, naturally enough, he got interested in the French repertoire, "and studied it with someone who had studied with Debussy, Marcel Ciampi". Although he was based in Paris, O'Rourke regards his pianistic education as being much wider than merely French. "The major input came in Belgium, in the mid-1970s. There was a man there who was able to answer the questions that pertained to me about piano technique, Jacques de Thiege. He's a phenomenal pianist, but he hasn't got the nerve for playing in public. That, I understand very well."

For O'Rourke, who admits a youthful awe of Horowitz, the pianistic pillars of the 20th century were Michelangeli and Richter. "They could do it all." And through a number of his teachers, he can trace his pianistic ancestry back to Michelangeli. But he doesn't really regard himself as being the product of any particular school of playing. "Ultimately, with any teacher, you either become a clone, or you don't. Fairly quickly, I realised that I had to go my own way."

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Going his own way is something that certainly applies to O'Rourke's taste in repertoire. "Every man has his face. You can love individual works by a composer who is not actually of your parallel nature. You can live without most of what they wrote. In my case that's Beethoven." Compared to other favourite composers, he says, "I can go quite a while without Beethoven." The favourites haven't changed much over the years. "I still absolutely revere Bach. I didn't play an awful lot of Bach for years, but now I do. Mozart. Certain works of Beethoven. Chopin, obviously. Schumann. Rachmaninov. And some 20th-century works, even up to the present time. I like very much to play the Lutoslawski concerto, which I'm doing again in Turkey, of all places, four performances.

"I want to come back to Liszt. I find Liszt comes very easily. It makes its own effect. It sounds very difficult, and obviously there are passages which are very difficult. But, by and large, Liszt is not as difficult to play as, say, the larger works of Schumann, or even Chopin." And, if there is a hole in his repertoire, says O'Rourke, it's the fact that he has never played either of the Liszt concertos, something he hopes to put right soon. For his forthcoming Music Network tour, O'Rourke can be heard in a sonata by Haydn ("a very witty, two-movement work"), a set of variations by John Field (O'Rourke's recordings of Field for Chandos have played a large part in widening his international career over the last few years), a piece by Esposito (a major musical activist in Dublin until the 1920s), Eric Sweeney's The Blackberry Blossom (one of the test-pieces for the 1991 Dublin International Piano Competition), and ending with two of the favourites: Schumann's Carnaval and Chopin's First Ballade.

Miceal O'Rourke's Music Net- work tour starts in Portlaoise on Wednesday, and takes him to Waterford, Furbo Church, Tralee, Dublin, Letterkenny, Antrim, Armagh, Downpatrick, and Portstewart