Leonskaja's Schubert: CD gold

'Who are your idols?,' I once asked a colleague while we were waiting to record a BBC World Service chat in Bush House. 'I don't have idols, I'm a professional critic' came the ludicrous reply. Well, just as I haven't 'grown out of' Der Rosenkavalier, as another pompous Brother in Apollo told me I would, I still have idols, and Elisabeth Leonskaja is the living pianist I'd rather hear more than any other; readers of The Arts Desk will know that I cover every UK appearance of hers that I can, and I still count it as one of the musical highlights of my life that I got to hear four late-night concerts in her 2010 Schubert cycle at the Verbier Festival - the first time she'd ever tackled them all - even if the Verbier experience per se wasn't an especially happy one for either of us (I've no desire to go back, much as I loved the solitary walks in the heights).

My seminal experience in Schubert's piano music dates back to March 1989 and Sviatoslav Richter's Chichester Cathedral recital, when I first heard the heavenly and hypnotic length at which he unfolded the first movement of the G major Sonata D894.

Leonskaja has her own very distinct voice in Schubert, but as Richter's protégée she was bound to follow his example in several respects (there's also a DVD on the lavish set I'm discussing here of the two playing Grieg's two-piano transcriptions of three Mozart piano sonatas and C minor Fantasia which I have yet to watch). One is that you don't EVER omit a Schubert repeat. When I interviewed her in Verbier, she recalled Richter's demands of students who dared to cut the inspiration short: 'what, you don't love Schubert's music?' And how the hell did Brendel dare to inculcate in pupils like Imogen Cooper a truncation which would mean omitting as inspired a passage (eight and a bit bars of first-time link back to the repeat) as this?

That of course occurs in arguably the greatest, certainly the most heavenly, of all Schubert's sonata first movements, the Molto moderato of D960. Unthinkable not to have the seismic rumble the only time it appears ffz in the movement (though apparently there's been some debate about the dynamic marking). We get all repeats, of course, on the four CDs in eaSonus's luxurious presentation - and never have I been happier to see such a homage, made to follow on the heels of Leonskaja's 70th birthday in November 2015. It comes with 48 pages of mini-biography in the form of more in-depth interviews than mine, enriched with a fine selection of personal photographs you won't have seen anywhere else. I have to quote two specific answers by the great lady. One is to the question: 'what do you try to pass on to students in a master class?'

1.   Love of music.
2.   Respect for the composer.
3.   Avoiding laziness.
4.   Self-confidence without arrogance.
5.   How to master the technique of playing the piano freely. In Moscow they used to tell us over and over again to sit comfortably and play freely and that's my approach now. That means free thumb (very important!), free elbows and wrists, and sitting comfortably at your instrument. All this leads to an unobstructed energy flow. At the beginning I find all this much more important than to work on the details and specific aspects of a particular piece.
6.   It's very important for me to be friendly, without too much finger-wagging. I simply concentrate on whatever I believe is blocking the student's progress.
7.   Passing my experience on to students without being condescending to them. It is essential to have a good atmosphere in order to work intensely and constructively.
8.   During the lesson, life takes a back seat, only music is important while we work. Teaching is an intimate and transcendental moment.

And to 'What are your sacred rules, your everyday doctrine?':

I think every day about what [Heinrich] Neuhaus [the greatest of pedagogues] used to say: 'Don't look for yourself in the music, but find the music in you'.

And Richter always used to say, 'It is not the what that matters, but the how'.

The 'how' of Leonskaja's Schubert I've tried to grasp over the years, but its essence is absolute clarity, an ability to switch from well-weighted orchestral pianism (something I always think of as the essence of the Russian school) to delicacy in a split second. She talks of wanting the public to have left a concert 'with the feeling of having found the grail', and that's happened to me, right from the first re-connection in the second half of her Chopin recital back in 2009. In the performance of the 'Trout' Quintet at Crail Church as part of this year's East Neuk Festival, I found myself within minutes of the first movement's beginning in that profound state of transport yet total awareness you only get in the best meditations. It's a shame there wasn't an official photographer to document her appearances; my post-performance shots, taken without flash of course, are inevitably fuzzy. See this as an imperfect souvenir.

Nothing is more phenomenal than Leonskaja's 'Wanderer' Fantasy, like the work itself an encyclopedic wonder of the world - I hope a recording will feature on the sequel to this set, due early next year - but she can also be wry and funny with total lightness, as in the finale of the 'Gasteiner' (D850). The physical energy and focus of D958's tarantella-finale are something you have to experience live to quite believe. And not even Richter produced as much shattering power as the time-bomb of D959's slow movement explodes at its terrifying heart.

I'm so grateful to Leonskaja, too, for proving that Schubert's quirky and lovable personality is there right from the first, five-movement sonata, D557, which I heard both in Verbier and Crail (again, I trust it will be included in Volume Two). The relatively early A minor Sonatas sound pretty miraculous in her hands, too; D784 is simply colossal. It's only when you get back to the last five that you realise the difference between great and supernaturally great. Here's to many more years of performances; in her seventies Leonskaja has lost nothing of the strength and clarity which are her trademarks, so there's no reason she shouldn't carry on as long as she wants to.

By way of a Schubert footnote, though it deserves pride of place and should have been included in my 'Music for a few' post, the duo recital of Martino Tirimo and Atsuko Kawakami at the Reform Club back in May (pictured above) reminded me very movingly what a great masterpiece is the F minor Fantaisie D940. Martino, a real gentleman and a seriously underrated top interpreter of Schubert, Mozart and Chopin, understands the ethereal yet still humanly bittersweet quality of late Schubert so well, and the sound of his former pupil was perfectly co-ordinated to match (Martino took the lower part).

The real surprise was Eduard Langer's transcription of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite - on the above front page it's clear that Tchaikovsky made the one for two hands, Langer for four - reminding one just how elaborate the composer's genius is in these miniature gems and how wonderful the counterpoint. An especially lovely touch was Atsuko side-tapping a tambourine for those essential ta-ta-ta-ta-taaas in the Arabian Dance. Afterwards I asked if they knew Rachmaninov's similar transcription of the Sleeping Beauty Suite, which they didn't, so I loaned the score to Martino when he came to the Frontline Club. Looking forward to their performance of it. Though if that, too, is to be at the Reform Club, the promoters will have to work a bit harder to get more folk in the audience than they did. These first-rate musicians deserve much better.

A Bach sermon on the mount

Any priest would be glad of the Utopian congregation - young and old, citizens of many nations and thence of the world - who attended Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Bach lecture in the courtyard of Montepulciano's Palazzo Ricci, home to the altruistic-sounding, Cologne-born European Academy of Music and Arts. This has been the main home for the various young musicians whose training and concert-giving have been at the heart of the festival Incontri in Terra di Siena: the International Menuhin Music Academy, students from the University of California, Los Angeles and - the ones I caught, and to whom my heart went out unreservedly - the Arab and Hebrew Israelis of the Polyphony Foundation based in Nazareth.

It's not my intention to write much about the festival here, except to point out that it owes its existence to that fine cellist Antonio Lysy, grandson of Antonio and Iris Origo whose Villa La Foce is the other centre of operations. My interview with the inspirational Ashkar brothers, violinist Nabeel Abboud  and master pianist Saleem, will appear as an Arts Desk Q&A next Sunday, and a report of my festival slice around La Foce the following Saturday.

JEG's special appearance was a surprise to me. It seemed to be there not so much as a successful attempt to flog the paperback edition of his Bach book - more on that below, pictured above in the second of three  pictures by resident ITS photographer Paul Flanagan - as an education to the young musicians. They  listened intently and afterwards asked lots of intelligent questions about vibrato and pedalling as well as staging Bach: an unwanted extra dimension, said JEG, once you bring in the alien apparatus of the opera house, it takes away from the experience. I'd agree with that, and I'd add that the director's imagination stops you exercising your own in a non-operatic drama. Pictured below, kids and adults (including the hugely entertaining Laurence Vittes from Los Angeles in the hat) along the colonnade from where I was sitting on the steps.

Bach's current earthly representative is indeed an inspirational speaker, because he not only has the most profound performing experience of what he's talking about, but also the highest enthusiasm and love. All this was apparent in a documentary which marked a vital staging post on the road back to intelligent television arts coverage. I possess in handsome, beautifully produced hardback the book of which he was signing copies afterwards, Music in the Castle of Heaven, and though I've not done any more than dipped into it yet, my good friend Stephen Johnson has recently been inspired by it and made me move it near the top of the list.

Both book and talk fulfil that essential function of making you either go to or immediately listen to key passages in the cantatas. I began my big Bach Sunday pilgrimage the January before this one, only getting up to Easter before my resolve to absorb and blog bit the dust, Even had I continued, I'd still not have heard all the masterpieces. JEG added more to my enthusiasm in his illustrations of Bach's astonishingly vivid musical-theatre instincts. I knew the splendid depiction of the calm at the eye of storm-tossed billows in the tenor aria from BWV 81, 'Die schäumenden Wellen von Belials Bächen', but not the last excerpt JEG played, from BWV 105.

It instantly brought tears to my eyes - rather ready after being able to grieve for the world horrors of the last two weeks at the previous evening's concert given by the young Arab-Hebrew partnership in Citta della Pieve - with a wavering between major and minor anticipating Schubert. JEG writes in his preface: 'we want to know what kind of a person was capable of composing music so complex that it leaves us completely mystified, then at other moments so irresistibly rhythmic that we want to get up and dance to it, and then at others still so full of poignant emotion that we are moved to the very core of our being'.

That last sums up for me the aria in question, 'Wie zittern und wanken, die Sünder Gedanken', oboe as soul, soprano as human, with only light string accompaniment. How could I have lived so long and never heard it? In that self-indulgent but not I think mawkish habit I have of choosing what music I'd like at my funeral, I decided on the spot that this would have to go in. If they outlive me, Debbie York and Lysander Tennant can conduct the dialogue; three solo strings will do for the support. But then, of course, I went to hear the whole cantata on YouTube, reeling at the rich, chromatic opening chorus, the distinctive bass recitative and the tenor's aria with rushing second violins, and decided that nothing less than the whole thing will do. Here's Herreweghe's performance, lovingly put up with printed music to follow and translation of the text. The soprano/oboe aria is at 6'17 but do listen to all of it.

And since I mentioned Schubert again, let's have my current craze, a disc I can't stop playing: Sviatoslav Richter effortlessly emanating pure summer/country happiness in the A major Sonata, D664.

This warmly recorded Tokyo 1979 performance is now on the bargain Alto label. Yes, I'm still buying CDs - though mostly Schubert and JEG's Bach cantata pilgrimage series.

So much for hardly clouded skies. Just as JEG's homily came to an end, a roll of thunder announced God's judgment, as he jokingly put it. The table of paperbacks was moved under the arcade, the heavens opened and while the author was signing copies for his enthusiastic audience including prizewinning Palestinian Israeli violinist Feras Machour in the red and white shirt (third of Paul's photos here),

I was trapped not too unwillingly in the Duomo a few yards up the hill with Taddeo di Bartolo's lovely altarpiece.

Umbrellaless, three of us made it through a relative break in the torrents to a cavernous ristorante where we sat down to bowls of piping hot home-made pasta in a cavernous ristorante , but lingered there rather impatiently as the downpour increased and rivers ran down the cobbled streets, flushing out some extraordinary large beetles which made our cicerona Nicky shriek but which I found fascinatingly beautiful. The storm lasted about four hours, after which we made our way to the Castelluccio Bifolchi near Villa La Foce for the Borromeo Quartet's evening Bartok epic, which isn't my concern here except to say that the spectators to the right of JEG in the first of my own three photos below are first violinist Nicholas Kitchen and cellist Yeesun Kim, his wife and a very radiant, calm-seeming personage, much like the present chatelaine of La Foce, Benedetta Origo.

Yeesun is listening to music with eyes shut in the photo, not sleeping, in case you wondered. I had the serendipitous pleasure of this wonderful  couple's company on the train to Florence, and a masterclass into the bargain, but that's another story.

Let me just leave you with this Castelluccio - not to be confused with our beloved village of the same name at the head of the Piano Grande in the Sibillini mountains - in the evening mists at altitude after the rain. Locals said they'd never seen the like in July. The stupendous garden at La Foce to follow in time.

Every cut a little death

Brutal chops in a couple of large-scale works I've heard over the past ten days reminded me of what Sviatoslav Richter had to say, recounted with warmth by his one-time duo partner Elisabeth Leonskaja when I had the huge pleasure of interviewing her at last year's Verbier Festival. We were talking about various approaches to the Schubert sonatas and I said how surprised I was, much as I liked the lady's general approach, by Imogen Cooper's omission of the exposition repeats in the Big 'Uns. Like D960, for instance, where by missing out the eight bars linking back to the first-movement repeat, she deprived us of essential music including a terrifying new appearance of the subterranean rumble which threatens the movement's stability.


Anyway, according to Leonskaja re Richter, 'If someone did not play a repeat, his question was: "You don’t love Chopin? You don’t love Schubert? Why?" [Does humble pupil voice] "Yes, I love it." "But why don’t you repeat?" And very often he said, "You know, for the public everything is interesting, only for the musicians is it not interesting to repeat." '

So I would have the same question for, of all people, that ardent champion of his fellow Czechs' music Jiří Bělohlávek when, last Thursday evening, I heard him reducing the admittedly long and involved symphonic poem I discussed below before the concert had taken place, The Golden Spinning Wheel, by about a third: 'You don't love Dvořák? Why?' Admittedly an elaborately descriptive piece such as this has its problems, but if you're going to do it, do it properly and, ideally, give a short introduction drawing in the orchestra to play a few signpost-snippets to help unacquainted listeners.


I'm assuming Bělohlávek must also do the same in his Chandos recording of The Noonday Witch, for again the timing comes out about five minutes shorter than the Rattle interpretation, which is one of Sir Si's finest achievements in terms of both colour and - surprising, but in this instance true - phrasing. At any rate, no-one would cut The Wood Dove, the most Mahlerian of the pack and very much more to the point. But I love all four; whatever the scene being depicted, Dvořák's genius for melody and unorthodox orchestration seems to burn at its brightest.

A more familiar casualty, and in this instance conductors take the cue from the doubtful composer himself, is Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony. It would be ungracious of me to cite the recorded performance I've just written the notes for, and been edited for my pains in pointing out what's not so good about the cuts in question.


Suffice it to say this isn't the first time I've heard a Russian slashing and burning the work. Yuri Ahronovitch many years ago took us aback by cutting the finale short with a straight reprise of the first-movement coda, denying Tchaikovsky's Manfred the very unByronic redemption which usually comes as a stick-in-the-throat apotheosis (though Vladimir Jurowski convinced me it could work).

That doesn't worry me as much as the lopping of some decidedly strong stuff earlier, especially in the finale's underground orgy. Ever since I deduced that the voices in the central fugue depict the five tempter spirits, I've doubled my pleasure in it; but in any case I reckon Tchaikovsky is unfairly lambasted for the few fugues, or fugatos, he does write; they seem to work pretty well to me. And much as he may have thought of dropping three of his four Manfred movements, much of the invention here is as fine as anything he wrote, and certainly unique in terms of orchestration.


On a not entirely unrelated note, I've followed a convoluted trail to watch some very significant threads and patches of what may be Sibelius's Eighth Symphony as performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic under John Storgårds. Wouldn't it be wonderful, as I wrote at the end of this Arts Desk Buzz piece, if Saraste could append these startling fragments to his upcoming instalment in the BBCSO's Sibelius cycle?

An Olympian in the Alps

I've turned Schubert-crazy again. As with Wagner, the mania comes and goes in waves. It all started with The Greatest Piano Recital I've Ever Heard, Richter's at Chichester Cathedral in March 1989, when he took an hypnotic half-hour over the first movement of the G major Sonata (D894). Then I hunted out all his recordings of the sonatas, and found his heavenly length the only way I wanted to hear Schubert. Now his one-time duo partner and protegee Elisabeth Leonskaja has come out from under the Richter shadow and forged her own great interpretations. And it's the palmy days of Richter all over again, though with a very different musical personality at the helm.


At Verbier high in the Alps, where I've just been privileged to spend three and a half music-and-walking-packed days, Leonskaja is currently working her way through the complete Schubert sonatas - half of them for the first time ever, as she told me in an interview which will appear probably around the time of her return to London to play D894 later this year. She clearly had as much smiling affection as I did for the first of the three late-night programmes I was privileged to hear in the vast temporary construction of the Salle des Combins. There, having moved from an apparently disastrous encounter with a poor piano and rough acoustics in the Verbier Cinema, she played the Sonata in B major, D575, and the unusual five-movement E major, D459. Hardly a couple of bars pass without Schubert revealing his own lovable, harmonically wayward personality, and you can rarely predict the progress of a melody (the third movement of D459 struck me forcibly in this respect).

So what is it that makes Leonskaja's Schubert so special? I came late to her extraordinarily deep and thoughtful concert-hall approach - music as a sacred rite - with the second half of her Chopin recital late last year. Here, it seemed, the range was extended. She can indeed be as Olympian as Schubert himself (her word for the opening movement of D850), with that fabulously weighted full sonority; but she catches the essence of his ability to leap from the thunderously epic to the intimately lyric. So we ranged - forgive the corny images prompted purely by a desire to put up a couple of Verbier snaps - from the babbling, high-altitude brook of D850's delicious finale


to the forbidding heights, glaciers and cataracts that disrupt the ineffable slow movement and finale of D959 (a performance which brought an instant standing ovation, as the colossal D major Sonata should have done the previous evening).


The articulation is phenomenal, the emotional commitment total. And the stern, concentrated figure on the platform is in extraordinary contrast to the vivacious, humorous woman you meet offstage - though one thing, a great humanity, connects the two.

And for now I'd better stop waxing lyrical, return to Verbier another day (due for a big Arts Desk piece on Sunday) and just count myself lucky to have heard great pianism in hugely contrasting styles, from Lewis and Pires at the Albert Hall on Wednesday to the 18 year old Kit Armstrong pouring forth musicality and playfulness in a Verbier trio concert and, of course, Leonskaja magisterially at the heart of it all.