THE 5% MOZART SOLUTION

Music

Acclaimed pianist Mitsuko Uchida— Japanese by birth, Austrian by training, British by choice, and reclusive by nature— is coming to New York for her Carnegie Hall solo debut

RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN

Where is she coming from? Her appearance suggests some feline and imperious figure out of a Japanese woodcut, her beauty delicate and irregular in outline, her manner refined yet gracious. But the tiny bluerimmed teacup I am handed for refreshment is, she briskly informs me, "from the Caughley pottery, about 1770," not Oriental at all, and the intonations of her conversational manner suggest a paid-up member of the London intelligentsia: sensible, ironic, nobody's fool, a patron of Marks & Spencer ("God knows what I'd do without it"), and an expert on the vagaries of the local bus system.

Then she starts talking about music. About her Bosendorfer piano, about her fascination for Schoenberg and passion for Schubert, about her need to analyze before she can perform—and suddenly she is earnest and transfixed, a priestess of her art, possessed by the spirit of Middle-European intensity.

The shifts are arresting, but they add up: Mitsuko Uchida is not so much a bundle of contradictions as a rich amalgam of blood and culture. She is also increasingly acknowledged around the world to be one of the supreme pianists of her generation.

She will be 44 this month, as her latest American tour reaches its climax on December 11 with her first solo recital at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Hers isn't playing that hits you like a thunderbolt. It doesn't aspire to the electrifying virtuosity of Vladimir Horowitz or the alabaster-smooth perfection of Arturo Michelangeli. What it offers instead is a finely held balance between clarity of articulation and depth of feeling—qualities which make her a great interpreter of Mozart, Schubert, and Debussy.

As Thomas Heinitz, a distinguished London record dealer and critic, explains, "Mitsuko understands the inner workings of a piece of music with the precision of a master watchmaker. But her art is never mechanically accurate. It breathes, it lives, it sings." Her colleague the conductor Jeffrey Tate points to her "stringent sense of architecture. . .and capacity to unroll a musical line with the elegance of a Japanese scroll," while fellow pianist Melvyn Tan is awestruck by "the meticulous research that she puts into everything she undertakes. It's not just a matter of knowing the notes or analyzing the harmony—she delves deep into the historical context as well."

But as the business raves and audiences roar, Mitsuko Uchida remains aloof, perhaps even a little disdainful. "She wants to be a pianist, not a personality," says her partner of many years, British diplomat Robert Cooper, with whom she shares a passion for Shakespeare and the habit of bicycling. Home is a small mews house next door to his, in a quiet yard off Portobello Road in West London, and inside it her daily existence is an austere one. "I need to focus," she says. "I need to clarify." You can sense this domestically, as you can hear it in her playing. "She hates fuss, chitchat, glitter. She would never go to a cocktail party," says Cooper. "She has a small circle of very close friends, but I sometimes think she'd do very well on a desert island, just her and a piano."

The walls are bare, the carpet oatmeal, the atmosphere functional—which is to say that the piano dominates. "Music is my life," she admits. "If there were no music, I should not live. It is as simple as that."

But it's also quite complicated. Mitsuko Uchida has followed her own fiercely individual trajectory. Never a wunderkind, never an overnight sensation ("Overnight sensations last just that long," she snaps dryly), she has made her way entirely on the passport of her talent, and her integrity is zealously prized. She gives interviews reluctantly, and keeps certain doors into her personal life courteously but firmly closed. She doesn't want to discuss her concert clothes (though critics frequently comment on her stunning appearance onstage). She has turned down opportunities to pose for advertisements. "That sort of thing would attract the wrong sort of person to my concerts. I'm not interested in this obsession with playing to the millions, just for the sake of it." Such brisk contempt for anything that reeks of easy vulgarity is fundamental to Mitsuko Uchida's style.

'I have always regarded myself las peculiar," she says with a I certain pride. "I don't like to be told things. I have never much liked being taught. Life has so many rules which the outside world enforces; the difficulty is sorting out which of them will work for you." This attitude has brought her into open rebellion against Japan and its culture, into which she was bom in 1948. Japanese music, for a start, means nothing to her: "I never put much effort into understanding it." Western music, however, was "a presence" for her from infancy, when her father returned to Tokyo from his stint as a diplomat in Berlin with a large collection of records of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Lotte Lehmann, Artur Schnabel, and other great names of the mid-century. He then decided that piano lessons were the proper thing for his children. "So I started playing because my brother and sister both did. In Japan, nobody does anything because they want to. You are not supposed to play for pleasure, but you are supposed to practice, and it becomes a duty. You never ask, What for? Why? Is this for me?"

Her first real shot of musical ecstasy came from a performance of Aida, when an Italian opera company visited Japan. She was nine, and she sat on her father's knee. "I still have a weakness for Verdi," she says with a sigh. Weakness? Why think of loving Verdi as a weakness? "No, I'm afraid it is a weakness," she confirms. This remark suggests the Teutonic seriousness of Uchida's musical education, which began in earnest when she was 12 and her father was posted as ambassador to Austria, to the mecca of the piano, the city of so many great composers from Mozart to Schoenberg—Vienna.

"I didn't want to go, and when I got there I hated it. The change of language, of my style of life—it was absolutely terrifying." But here music became more to her than just another duty. "I had lessons at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art; I gave my first recital at the age of 14. My teacher said, 'You want to be a pianist now, don't you?' But I didn't know that 1 did. It took me a long time to work it out. I was never deeply interested in anything else except music, I knew that I loved playing the piano, but I had no idea what making a career out of it might imply."

"I could go with my parents and end up as the ambassador's talented daughter, playing at embassy soirees. Or I could stay in Vienna."

When she was 16, her father was sent back to Berlin, and she faced a stark choice. "I could go with my parents and end up as the ambassador's talented daughter, playing the piano at embassy soirees—then back to Japan, and a decent marriage and so on. Or 1 could stay in Vienna: it would be lonely, but I could continue my studies and 1 would be free. I chose the latter. It wasn't easy: I was lonely. I am always lonely."

What is remarkable about the way she talks about these years is the absence of any acknowledgment of the influence of a teacher or guide: only Richard Hauser, a pupil of the composer Anton von Webern whom she refers to as "an interesting case," rates more than a cursory mention. Otherwise you get the impression that Mitsuko Uchida the pianist is her own creation. "I think that her independence of mind is a trait of Japanese women who have had to struggle to free themselves of the restrictive roles that their society assigns them," says Jeffrey Tate. Uchida herself would agree. "I don't accept things easily. I misunderstand. I even misunderstand myself."

So at 19 she was out of school and into the jungle, with nobody really to advise her. "My parents neither encouraged nor discouraged me. I am grateful for that. But 1 had no connections, no letters of introduction, so it was hard to start professionally." She trudged the round of international competitions—"It was a way to survive"—and won several prizes, none of them spectacular enough to matter much. More significant was her decision, at the age of 22, to leave Vienna. Looking back at her 11 years in the city, she has mixed feelings. "I never wanted to admit it, but the older I get the more I see how deep the influence of my Viennese training has been. It is something so much a part of me that I find it hard to describe, but I feel it when I hear the Vienna Philharmonic play —every other orchestra sounds slightly wrong in comparison. And I can play a Strauss waltz without thinking! Yet I feel that Vienna is my past, not my present. I could never live there again."

She chose to move to London. "I thought of New York for a moment, but I rejected it, because I knew I belonged to Europe. Anywhere in Germany would have been too much like Vienna. Paris I rejected because the French are essentially not musical. So I chose London and have never regretted it." Twenty years later, Robert Cooper's view is that "her nationality has become English, her values are English. She has essentially English tolerance and respect for privacy, and her mastery of the subtleties of the language is amazing in someone who is not a native speaker." "I've sorted myself out here," she comments simply. "The great attraction of London for me was the freedom of thought. In Japan and Vienna, it was all rules, duty, tradition: you must do this, you must not do that. Here you are allowed to make up your own mind."

It was in London, too, that the major breakthrough occurred. In 1982 she gave a complete cycle of Mozart sonatas at Wigmore Hall (a feat she repeated for last year's bicentennial at Alice Tully Hall in New York). Thomas Heinitz remembers how the concerts early in the series were half empty. "Then the word got around, and it was impossible to get a ticket. Her playing frightened the hell out of me. How dare a Japanese girl, I thought, give me so much new insight into my music, music that I've known for a lifetime?"

Another bowled-over member of that Wigmore Hall audience was Erik Smith, doyen of British record producers, who signed her up exclusively to the Philips label and went on to work with her many times in the studio.

You mustn't think of her as coldly meticulous—there's a side of her that is almost crazily exuberant."

many "It's always been difficult to get her to agree to make a record," he laments (apart from the cycles of Mozart concertos and sonatas, she has to date released only three "The other discs—two of Chopin, one of Debussy), "but was once you've got her there, she's tremendous. Most Vienna, artists in the studio are sunk in miseries of selfcriticism and complain endlessly. Mitsuko is the opposite. 'Oh, that's really rather good, isn't it?' she'll say when we're listening to the playbacks. Then she'll want to do it all over again—and again—in a quite different way. She loves to experiment: however many takes we do, she rarely repeats herself.

Without hesitation, she calls Mozart "the greatest of composers," but she is entering a phase of her career when she will play much less of his music; at Carnegie Hall, the program will consist of Beethoven, Schumann, Webern, and Schubert. "Mozart I now play only 5 percent of the time, although I suppose the public will go on perceiving me for a while as a Mozart specialist. There is more Schubert coming now, more Debussy. I am passionate about the music of the Second Viennese School— Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Bach's preludes and fugues I want to play when I am 70."

"The great attraction of London for me was the freedom of thought. In Japan and Vienna, it was all rules, duty, tradition."

The catalogue of her enthusiasms is exhilarating, but highly discriminating.

The big Romantic blockbusters don't interest her. "I heard her play Rachmaninoff's 'Paganini Rhapsody' once," says Thomas Heinitz. " 'Very nice, dear, but don't do it again; it's not really you,' I told her." The advice seems to have been taken. She has "a block" about Russian music, "although one day it may come down," and finds a lot of late-19th-century music "overblown." There are no bonne bouche encores handed out at her concerts, no overheated transcriptions played to wow the crowds. She looks a bit sniffy when you mention such things— me not she's a a personality pianist, remember, or a perand times forming 1 think animal. I would "Somebe quite happy to play for myself," she says. "I certainly don't need an audience in order to feel satisfied." This year has given her a chance to test out this sort of solitude, She has spent much of it on sabbatical at home, "playing the piano and trying to get to bed earlier" (after concerts, she can't unwind until three or four A.M.). In the summer, she had a happy month at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, centered on chamber music and informal coaching and guidance of younger musicians. Otherwise, her

days have passed in almost monastic calm, reading, learning, and thinking music. "In a sense, you could call me a narrow person," she says. Yes, but in another sense you couldn't. Although she claims that the piano marks her beginning and end, friends report on a lot else bubbling away in between. She is no puritan. Good wine, holidays in France, art galleries, the movies and theater, voracious consumption of English, German, Japanese, and French literature all pile into a life further spiked by an irrepressible sense of humor (Gary Larson, the syndicated American cartoonist, is another of her weaknesses).

What is more baffling is the way that the Japanese ambassador's daughter in her seems to have been suppressed. Her relation to the first epoch in her life is hostile, and it's hard to get her to say a good word about her native country. "She's loyal to and enormously fond of her family—she calls her mother every day—but I wonder how close she is to them spiritually," one friend says. Her frankness (which can be "quite alarming" in the view of Melvyn Tan) seenjs like a reaction against the bowing and kowtowing which color all human communication in Japan.

Yet despite Robert Cooper's opinion that "her nationality has become English," other of her friends see aspects of her personality that have remained untouched by her move to the West. Sometimes this emerges in something quite superficial: her surrogate parents in New York, Adele and Irving Moskovitz, ardent music lovers who met her 20 years ago, are touched by the way she sometimes sits cross-legged at breakfast, and feel that her ritual presentation of gifts ("always very simple and tasteful") is Japanese in style. Jeffrey Tate believes that "Mitsuko's discipline and concentration, the impulse in her playing to seek out the essential line," are further evidence of the influence of her cultural roots.

"I think she shares the Japanese philosophy of nature," says another close New York friend, Kazuko Oshima, a successful designer of healing-crystal jewelry, which Uchida buys and distributes in quantities. Kazuko has made Mitsuko godmother of Bobi, a one-footed canary that flew into her open window five years ago. In her Manhattan apartment, Kazuko plays Bobi Mitsuko's Mozart recordings, and she has taken him with her to Tanglewood and Philadelphia when Mitsuko was giving concerts. His godmother faxes him valentines and birthday cards.

This sort of receptivity to other people and their worlds is another of Uchida's most notable characteristics. It extends from Kazuko Oshima and her New Age beliefs to the drawing room of 91 -yearold Eve Moles worth, a friend of Picasso and Giacometti, now nearly blind and chair-bound, whom she visits en route to and from Heathrow airport. It was Mitsuko who threw her a 90th-birthday party; it is Mitsuko who talks to her doctors, calls her up "just to tell me a joke," and keeps her abreast of the news in the arts.

"I try to be as accurate and honest as possible, in language and in music," Uchida says. It is a modest ambition, perhaps, for a great musician, but a sane one. "I don't think public success means much to her. She is too relentlessly self-critical, for one thing," says Eve Molesworth, "and privately very critical of what others are doing." So what fires her, what impels her? Uchida shakes her head impatiently at the question: "I just don't think about myself in those terms."

Yet think she does. One of the great strengths of her music-making is its sheer intellectual lucidity—she talks, significantly, about the pleasure of "deciphering" a score—as well as its transcendence of the inspiration of the moment: Mitsuko Uchida always knows exactly what she is doing at the piano and why she is doing it. This rationality makes her an excellent broadcaster, and she has made several television programs, with Jeffrey Tate, among others, in which she deftly explains to the intelligent layman the workings of a piece of music. It is a field she hopes to explore further.

Another latent gift is for conducting. After she led some performances of Mozart concertos from the piano, a German opera house reportedly was impressed enough to offer her the podium for a production of Le Nozze di Figaro. She declined, but it cannot be out of the question that one day she will follow in the footsteps of pianists like Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, and Maurizio Pollini. Thomas Heinitz is amused to observe that at concerts "she can't stop herself from indulging in some quite dramatic armchair conducting—much to the astonishment of those in neighboring seats."

Meanwhile, she has enough on her plate. Because she loathes constant travel and the empty glamour of fivestar-hotel life, she limits her concertizing to about 50 appearances a year— about half of what many of her colleagues undertake. At present, her attention is most deeply absorbed by the first work commissioned specially for her—a concerto by the British composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, to be premiered on May 5 in Paris, under the baton of Pierre Boulez. She has already been delivered the score, and it represents a major challenge. "It is very strong, but not easy. I have to do a helluva lot of work on it."

She pours herself one small glass of vintage champagne. She is rushing off— via the 52 bus—to the Royal Albert Hall, where her beloved Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra is playing. Her excitement at the prospect is almost childlike. "I am insatiably greedy for music," she admits, "and I have to clear the rest of my life to make room for it." But she has remained a human being in the process. "Oh, she's glorious, just glorious," says Thomas Heinitz, who has heard and known many of the century's most celebrated musicians. "I thought I had reached the stage of life at which there could be no more surprises. But Mitsuko has illuminated my old age. She is pure joy."