The conductor and musical populariser Charles Hazlewood likes to hark back to
the days before classical music was suffocated by “ludicrous etiquette”,
when audiences would “go to a gig and drink and chat with their mates” while
listening with half an ear. I’d love to see him try this at one of Mitsuko
Uchida’s concerts.
“No! No! I think that is rubbish!” roars Dame Mitsuko, when I put the idea to
her. “When I play a note of Schubert I don’t want anybody walking around and
talking. I stop and say 'Go out, goodbye!’ Of course! You must be joking!!!”
Renowned for the sort of implacable commitment to the pianist’s art you’d
associate with such names as Alfred Brendel or Murray Perahia, Uchida is at
the opposite pole from those who believe the future of classical music lies
in getting people who look like supermodels to play it in “chill-out” clubs.
“Maybe these people who think it is so easy are more talented than I am,”
she says. “For me it is difficult, and I don’t mind admitting it. But today
people want things to happen fast and earn a lot of money, and therefore it
is even more important to go to concerts. It gives you a totally different
way of concentrating and to have a pocket of time where you can forget about
the reality of life.
“Mozart’s music, for instance, is the essence of human life and he becomes
more beautiful all the time. It speaks to you differently at different
times. That is the beauty.”
We’re sitting in her rehearsal studio in a quiet mews off the Portobello Road,
a high-ceilinged space with plenty of room for her three pianos. She’s in
the midst of rehearsals for a European tour with the Bayerischer Rundfunk
orchestra (known here as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra) under Mariss
Jansons, which brings her to London next week. Her home is in a separate
building opposite, and the orderly demarcation of her domestic and
professional arrangements reflects her steely intellectual discipline.
Yet Uchida seems far from being some scholastic automaton. Her conversation
is punctuated by manic wails of laughter, as when she confesses her passion
for Matt’s cartoons in the Telegraph (“People tell me the sports pages are
good, but I could buy the paper
just for Matt”).
She was born in the seaside resort of Atami, 50 miles south-west of Tokyo, in
1948, though she has been based in Europe since her diplomat-father moved
the family to Vienna when she was 12. She had no friends or relatives
affected by the recent Japanese disasters, though Atami was badly damaged in
the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. She was appointed Dame of the British
Empire in 2009 after living in London for 35 years, having decided that the
Vienna where she studied was too pedantically possessive of its musical
heritage.
“I love London,” she says, “and where else can I find a studio in the middle
of town?”
But she isn’t blind to the city’s less prepossessing aspects The first few
minutes of our interview are spent discussing garbage recycling, which she
insists is deplorably ineffective in her borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
“This is the only country where the recycling is not separated,” she says.
“Paper and glass and plastic together? How are you going to pick the glass
from the paper? This pretence of being 'green’ – give me a break! I’m pretty
sure it all goes to some landfill.”
This sceptical approach extends to her music, where she has selected the
composers and fellow-performers with whom she can most effectively exercise
her talents, and won’t be lured into wasting her time on anything less. For
Uchida, the bottom line is serving the composer’s intentions, and she can’t
abide egocentric posturing.
“I like people who read the score carefully, because without that you can’t go
anywhere,” she says. “You can’t just come up and say 'I am inspired’. There
is no such thing. If you are inspired, I say 'OK, go
and compose.’ If you’re using another composer’s piece of music, at least have
the decency to try to decipher what other people, who are a million times
greater than you, might have thought. That’s my basic principle in life.”
She says that these days, she only works with people with whom she can say it
is a privilege. “Now at every concert I watch the conductor and figure out
what they’re doing. I play and direct Mozart, and I have to learn to conduct
better.”
She’s not doing badly. Her first live recording of Mozart concertos with the
Cleveland Orchestra, where she conducted K488 and K491 from the piano,
brought her a first-ever Grammy award last month, and she recently released
a second disc comprising K466 and K595. Meanwhile, her schedule includes
several British engagements. After the South Bank with Jansons, she’ll
perform Schubert’s Winterreise with Ian Bostridge at the Wigmore Hall next
month, and in May she’ll play Beethoven at the Barbican with the LSO and
Colin Davis.
Though identified with a core repertoire of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert,
she points out that Debussy and Messiaen also fall within her orbit, and her
Viennese years imprinted her with a detailed knowledge of the 12-tonists
Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Having mastered Boulez’s Notations, she aims to
play more of his work. Boulez, music’s erstwhile scorched-earth terrorist,
occupies an almost avuncular role in her pantheon. “In the old days, you
wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole!” she hoots. “But Pierre has mellowed,
and he’s immensely kind.”
Rehearsing and performing consume most of her time, but she has made sustained
commitments to the Marlboro Music summer school in Vermont, where she
collaborates with gifted younger artists, and the Borletti Buitoni Trust,
which makes financial awards to selected young musicians who are in the
process of establishing their careers. She stresses that the latter’s
four-person panel chooses musicians solely on artistic merit, blanking out
such meretricious notions as marketing and PR.
“Even schools like Juilliard are telling students that PR is the most
important issue,” she says. “I say it is the least important issue if you
have something musical to say! If you have something to say, the world will
come to you.
“I notice you see classical musicians in posters advertising expensive
watches. That person may be able to command a very high fee, but that’s not
the point. I can vouch that people come to my concerts to hear music, not
because they have seen me looking grand with an expensive watch.”
Watch
Uchida conduct Piano Concerto #20 - Allegro I on YouTube
Uchida plays Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 at the Festival Hall (020
7960 4200) on March 25, part of the Shell Classic International series, and
the Beethoven Quintet in E flat at the QEH on March 27. Starting on May 26,
she will perform a complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos with the
LSO at the Barbican (020 7638 8891)
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