Andras Schiff at the Wigmore Hall
Armando Iannucci recently had the sheer bottle to stand up in front of many of Britain's most distinguished classical musicians and confess that he didn't much care for Mozart.
In the same spirit I now confess that, until now, I've never really got Andras Schiff. Admired him, yes. Respected him, yes. But, a bit like Iannucci and Mozart, have been a little unmoved by him.
I feel safe to admit it now, because I've just returned from the simply stunning lecture he gave at the Wigmore Hall which blew my proverbial socks away. I am a convert.
Schiff is nearing the end of his cycle of all 32 Beethoven sonatas and, rather late in the day, a friend mentioned that the best-kept secret and hottest ticket in town was the mid-afternoon lectures he was giving the day before recitals. He promised to blag me one.
It's quite rare to find a first rank performer who is almost as articulate in words as in music.
Schnabel's autobiography, My Life and Music, has a long section devoted to the question-and-answer sessions he would sometimes take part in with audiences, speaking with epigrammatical fluency ("Mozart - too easy for children, too difficult for adults."). Alfred Brendel's conversations with Martin Meyer in The Veil of Order are also worth chasing.
And now there is Schiff - on this form, speaking for two-and-a-half hours (in his third language) on three of the greatest of all Beethoven sonatas - opus 90, 101 and 106, all of which he's playing on Wednesday May 24 (sold out, I'm afraid, like the lecture).
He began with ritual apologies about trying to find words to talk about music this great. He wouldn't attempt a dry analysis - he'd leave that to musicologists, who were, he said, almost like scientists. And there was nothing dry about what followed.
We began with opus 90. After playing the exposition he paused. "This is not pretty music, anything but pretty. It's not cliched." Beethoven is not trying to please you here."
Sitting at the keyboard throughout and never pausing, except for one swig of water after about 90 minutes, he took us through the structure of each movement with numerous illustrations - not only from the work in hand, but from parallels in Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Bach. It was soon apparent that he has a formidable intellectual grasp on these works and their structures. On top of that he has that legendary memory, with the ability to start and stop a complex fugue almost at random and pick it up again at exactly the right spot (with a spooky recall of bar numbers.)
He moved on to "the extraordinarily experimental" opus 101. "This," he observed, "was the favourite Beethoven sonata of Richard Wagner. It plays to his concept of infinite melody. It breathes, but it never ends ..."
He adds: "I have my problems with Wagner, but we won't go into that now."
And then (we're now 95 intense minutes in) he moves onto opus 106 - "the greatest of his sonatas, certainly the most monumental. He knew he was writing something extraordinary, something which would keep pianists and music lovers busy for ever."
But, Schiff adds, it was also a work that many people respected and revered rather than loved. He loved it, and would explain why.
It begins with Beethoven's metronome mark (minim = 138) - which, says the great technical perfectionist is "virtually unplayable". Ergo (say many pianists) Beethoven's metronome must have been a crock.
I once discussed this very subject with Peter Stadlen, a concert pianist (and former Telegraph music critic) who went to extraordinary lengths to settle the question, including finding a contemporary metronome, slowing it down by oiling it with green olive oil adulterated with dust and allowing to oxidize. As Andrew Porter once wrote in the New Yorker, it still kept time.
Schiff agrees: nothing wrong with the speed. The problem is other pianists - even his great idol Edwin Fischer. He parodies the approach, portentously labouring the opening bars. "That's the way most of you know this sonata - admit it."
"The music should sound revolutionary, explosive, not"... He stumbles into German ... "not made of leather ... If Beethoven wrote this metronome mark, let's take him seriously, let's give it a try."
With which he considers the opening bar with the all-seeing eye of the musical intellectual, who is also wised up to most of the professional tricks of the trade ...
"It's written for one hand," Schiff notes. "It's very difficult. It's very easy to miss. So what do pianists do?"
He illustrates: some play the first note in the left hand, and the first chord in the right hand. Some contort themselves to play the first note in the right hand.
"This," he pronounces with unexpected fierceness, " is disgusting".
"With Beethoven you have got to take risks. If you miss it, it's human. Beethoven didn't play music like competition winners today, he couldn't have cared less."
There follows the most elegant, erudite, sweeping, detailed story of the sonata and why Schiff loved it, interrupted by the occasional diffident apology for trying to force his views on us. Though he does make special pleading for the slow movement - "the greatest slow movement, not just in Beethoven, not just for piano solo, but ... I just don't know anything comparable. It's the deepest description of pain and despair in all music."
So, I'll be there again tonight, a new convert to Schiff. And I'll bet Armando Iannucci that his indifference to Mozart wouldn't survive five minutes of the Schiff treatment.
