The Candid Chameleon

Europe and America are currently enjoying a golden age of pianism, with masters such as Murray Perahia, Richard Goode, Maurizio Pollini, Peter Serkin, and others playing at their artistic peak. Yet even amid this distinguished company, Hungarian-born pianist András Schiff, born in 1953, offers some qualities that separate him from the pack and that will be on display when Mr. Schiff performs at Carnegie Hall on October 24, with further installments scheduled for next April.Mr. Schiff’s most distinguishing characteristic is his outspokenness on matters of ethics and music, or rather music as ethics. In 2000, Mr. Schiff made headlines when he canceled a planned concert at Washington, D.C.’s Austrian Embassy to protest the rise of Austria’s far-right-wing politician Jörg Haider. Mr. Schiff wrote in a letter to the embassy that Mr. Haider’s advance “in a country whose role in the Holocaust still awaits clarification is more than unsettling, it’s shameful and unforgivable.” Mr. Schiff was born in Budapest to parents who had lost previous spouses in the Holocaust. Leaving communist Hungary in his mid-20s, Mr. Schiff accepted Austrian citizenship, but was soon dismayed by ambient Austrian anti-Semitism. Making a pun on the name of the former Austrian president Kurt Waldheim who served in the Nazi Wehrmacht, he told friends, “Some Austrians have Waldheimer’s disease; they forget that they were Nazis.”Later moving to Italy and England (he is now a British citizen), Mr. Schiff continues to issue passionate public statements. When the violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin died in 1999, Mr. Schiff wrote to the Guardian to protest that “present-day English obituaries of remarkable people are no longer tributes or appreciations, but rather like bad reviews.” Menuhin, who as a child prodigy played “like an angel blessed with incredible maturity combined with childlike innocence, deserved better,” Mr. Schiff wrote. In 2006, also in the Guardian, Mr. Schiff bravely assailed a powerful British arts editor and musical critic, Norman Lebrecht, who “attacked Wolfgang Amadeus in a most unfair manner.” Mr. Schiff would not quote from Mr. Lebrecht’s writings “because they represent — to me — musical journalism at its most disagreeable.” But Mr. Schiff is celebrated for more than his candor. He has a chameleon-like ability to incarnate a given composer at the keyboard. His Haydn (which may be seen and heard on a new DVD from Hungaroton) is warmly witty and humane without being smart-alecky; his Beethoven is as willful, abrupt, and uncompromising as Ludwig himself must have approached his own music. Beethoven, a man of fabled tantrums and shaggy individualism, wrote sonatas that, despite their overall elegant idiom, possess a barely suppressed urgency, sometimes even fury. This is what Mr. Schiff has captured so well on the CDs of an ongoing Beethoven sonata series for ECM. And in performance, Mr. Schiff thinks and acts like Beethoven with astonishing conviction, proving that he is a highly skilled actor as well as a mightily gifted musician. His life trajectory and travels over the past several years probably contributed to this aspect of his talent. A 1996 recording of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata on Warner sounds a trifle smoothed-out compared to the way Mr. Schiff tackles Beethoven today. Only the greatest performers can, over the years, deliberately become less polished for greater artistic effect.How did Mr. Schiff achieve this quantum leap in artistic growth? As a young man he studied at Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt Academy, a fabled conservatory which has produced a series of warm-toned, humane pianists including Annie Fischer, Peter Frankl, and the current up-and-coming young performer Klára Würtz. His early mentors included the distinguished Hungarian composer György Kurtág and the English pianist and harpsichordist George Malcolm, with whom Mr. Schiff recorded a delectable recital for Decca of Mozart’s Piano Music for 4 Hands, recently reissued by Arkiv CDs. Also newly on Arkiv are Mr. Schiff’s joyous early recordings of Mozart concertos with his compatriot, the exuberant Falstaffian maestro Sándor Végh. Mr. Schiff’s abundant recordings of Mozart express a tender, even naïve aspect of the composer. Like Mozart himself, Mr. Schiff is able to attain a kind of musical Elysium, as he also does in an unexpectedly paradisiacal CD of polkas by the 19th-century Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, newly reprinted in a Warner CD set of his solo piano recordings.Some critics have accused Mr. Schiff of shunning modern music. But he has made dazzling recordings of Béla Bartók’s piano concertos, as well as those of another, more recent Hungarian composer, Sándor Veress (1907–1992), whom Mr. Schiff interprets on Warner with agile, evenhanded lucidity. For ECM he has also recorded a recital of music by Leos ? Janáček, capturing the forest magic of the nature themes dear to the great 20th-century Moravian composer.An unexpected educational detour came with Mr. Schiff’s accompaniment of classical song recitals, notably for the German tenor Peter Schreier. Their earnest, ardently loving 1989 recording of Schubert’s cycle “Die schöne Müllerin” on Philips preserves the freshness of the composer’s village setting. In a 2002 live Salzburg Festival recital of Schumann songs with Mr. Schreier on Orfeo CDs, Mr. Schiff captures the spooky, mystical world of Schumann, often a step away from lunacy. A year later, in a Debussy/Mozart recital for ECM with the soprano Julianne Banse, Mr. Schiff differentiates brilliantly between these two complementary but dissimilar composers, offering an innocent yet preternaturally wise Mozart and a knowing, yet tender, Debussy.Coping with these different interpretive voices as well as conducting his own chamber ensemble, the Capella Andrea Barca, has clearly enlarged Mr. Schiff’s musical scope. He has led live performances, including Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion” and Mozart’s “Così fan tutte,” with more persistence than most other top-ranked pianists who try out the podium. In three concerts last year at Alice Tully Hall, he and the Capella Andrea Barca performed Mozart’s concertos and symphonies with memorable grace and emotion.He has also embraced chamber music, with CDs of Schubert’s Piano Trios on Warner and Beethoven’s cello sonatas on ECM, in both cases partnered by his compatriot the cellist Miklós Perényi.Mr. Schiff’s Beethoven sonatas may sound abrupt and even at times eccentric (as New York’s music critics will doubtless point out), but no more abrupt or eccentric than Beethoven himself was. With such a wide range of performing idioms, small wonder that Mr. Schiff’s Beethoven sonatas express such far-reaching musical mastery.

The Candid Chameleon

The Candid Chameleon

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