Plushmusic films Lortie’s return to Chopin’s etudes
‘I try always to take a naive attitude towards a recording session like this,’ says the celebrated French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie. ‘I could feel some kind of weight on my shoulders but it was only as I sat down to play that I realised that returning to Chopin’s études was a big, big challenge.’
After a ten-year break, Lortie has returned to the Chandos label. He first recorded Chopin’s études for Chandos more than 20 years ago; it was named as one of the ‘50 great performances by superlative pianists’ by BBC Music Magazine. Since then he’s enjoyed an exceptionally rich performing and recording career. He won First Prize in the Busoni Competition in 1984. He was also a prize-winner at the Leeds Competition. He’s been named an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec – and he’s made over 30 recordings on the Chandos label, exploring a repertoire that extends from the 18th to the 21st century; from all of Mozart piano concertos to the piano music of Thomas Adès.
No part of this repertoire, you would imagine, would pose quite the level of technical challenge set by the études, never mind that Lortie is touring the lot of them in recital – a feat described by a wag at the Washington Post as ‘equivalent in its physical demands and terrifying exposure to running a marathon and posing for a Vanity Fair cover shoot on the same day’.
Incredibly, Lortie approached the recording of Plushmusic’s forthcoming film with a certain equanimity. The setting helped. The brand-new Britten Studio – cobbled together from a kiln, a dovecote and a ruined granary – is a 340-seat haven of golden wood, old brick and concrete, and boasts an acoustic ideally suited to Louis Lortie’s approach on the exceptionally sensitive and balanced Fazioli piano. The engineer helped: it turned out that Chandos’s Peter Newble has known Louis Lortie for years. When push came to shove, though, it was up to Lortie to help himself: ‘I’m fortunate in that I learned the études early in my life,’ he explains. ‘The built-in technique that I learned from this music is something to be treasured.’
Lortie’s technical surety gives him the confidence not to prejudge the changes 20 years have wrought on his style. ‘I would rather trust that the interval has given me a conscience,’ he laughs. ‘A conscience, I mean, concerning style. When you’re young you’re playing so much repertoire that you confuse everything a little bit: your Brahms has a little bit of Chopin in it, and your Schumann has a little bit of Beethoven. If I’ve been doing my job, what I play now should be fresher, purer. Of course, the best compliment a pianist could ever get is ‘I thought Chopin was playing’. But one has to be realistic. Liszt himself said, I can imitate anyone, but Chopin - that is impossible.’
Rather than strive to achieve an impossible ideal (he has said, on another occasion, ‘As we get older we can start to get very set in our ways – it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we are the ones who always know better’) Lortie prefers to explore the challenge the études set a body in constant transition. ‘Chopin started writing them around 18, 19 years of age, and finished them in his early twenties. Keeping them fresh is a challenge, of course, but that’s only the beginning. The études confront you with the way your own body is changing and evolving. And, yes, you have to confront your own decay.’
Louis Lortie plays the complete Chopin études at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, 23 November 2009.
Following the concert, Plushmusic releases Louis Lortie’s Aldeburgh recital in HD video and audio, along with a video interview of Louis Lortie in conversation with Ivan Hewett of the Telegraph.
