"ANDRAS who?" ask classical cloth ears could put surnames to Nigel, Luciano, Jose, Kiri or Sir Simon. Andras Schiff is a buft's pianist whose quality is summed up by a Gramophone magazine critic who reckons him among the most gifted and mercurial musicians of our time".
Schiffs billing as star player and director of a six hour concert celebrating Schubert's 200th birthday tomorrow guaranteed a sell out before Christmas at London's Wigmore Hall. He'll pack them in for another Schubertathon when he plays all Schubert's sonatas from February 5th-22nd. In between, he is participating in the National Concert Hall's Schubert Weekend next Sunday.
Born in Hungary in 1951, Schiff can earn more than £5,000 a performance, and half the year travelling the global concert circuit pays for homes in London and Florence, plus New Year jaunts up the Nile. "I'm glad I've built a certain following," he says. "To me it's enough. I'm not against selling millions of records but won't reach out for the people who buy Nigel Kennedy." Why? "I despise that kind of thing." Why? "Because it's very bad music."
I first saw Schiff playing very good music at the final recording session of Beethoven's piano concertos with Bernard Haitink conducting the Dresden Staatskappele. At the end, the orchestra tapped their bows on the music stands, a muted professionals' tribute rarer than the simulated ecstasy of an average audience. "I treat recording as performance in an empty hall," Schiff said later. True. Without a score he had played entire movements with passion and precision and the resulting CDs, out next autumn, will be the record of intense performances unmediated by intrusive producers.
Afterwards the orchestra rushed off for an evening stint at the local opera house, leaving Schiff and Haitink unapproachable in a gaggle of record company people. The cardie clad main men commanded the hushed consideration due to those emerging from a major operation. Nobody sneered at the star hoo-ha of their feigned reluctance to stand close enough together for a photographer to take a snapshot to fit a CD cover.
Schiff is the man most likely to replace Murray Perahia as post millennial piano superstar and yet Decca let him go because praise, talent and packed halls don't necessarily translate into CD sales. Teldec, a German classical label now owned by Time Warner, signed him knowing he'll resist all attempts at image building. They've taken on a personality problem they define in negatives. "You want me to describe him?" said a Teldec exec. "He's not an outreach artist. He's not flashy." Schiff echoed the word. "Flashy personalities like the three tenors have moved musical interpretation in a bad direction. Today it's not enough for the big public that somebody makes beautiful music. They want something flashy."
They want an image? "I think an image is your personality, your choice of repertoire and the way you approach music. The trouble starts when record companies want to make your image for you. If you are not very firm in your ideas, you let them make it and that's dangerous." A way of avoiding the danger is playing hard to get. The Schubert anniversary, an obvious hook to jolly up CD sales, had Teldec paying for me and another journalist to fly to Germany. But Schiff would only talk Beethoven.
We learned he has a life plan and has waited until his early 40s to record Beethoven's concertos and needs another decade before he's ready to record the sonatas. He praised the Dresden orchestra for drawing on a centuries old tradition and being a local band. And that was that. Tomorrow was Amsterdam, then Brussels and Zurich, so we flew our separate ways and it took a minuet of phone calls between agent and Teldec PRs to arrange a face to face interview.
His looks are a cross between a Rembrandt self portrait and John McEnroe minus the snarl. Over lunch he was devoid of performer pomp and ignored the closed shop conventions of interviews by naming villainous names: Kennedy and the three tenors; Glenn Gould playing loud when the score says soft; compilation discs; "cheap literature and silly books - over engineered recordings - the indiscriminate hallelujahs that greet anything that Gardiner or Norrington does". He despises authentic instrument CDs as "carefully tailored products" dependent on technology and editing. "The recordings don't resemble a live performance, and most of the things they play they never do in concert. They sight read them in the studio and I oppose that. A recording must be a document of when you have reached a phase in your life. You don't have the right to record a piece sight reading in the studio. It's not serious."
Serious praise belongs to dead heroes such as Furtwangler and Busch, and he started by loading religious significance on three composers at the centre of the classical canon. "I would call Bach the father, Mozart the son and Schubert the holy spirit."
He got stuck straight into Schubert, calling him "the most human, vulnerable and modest" of his holy trinity and seemed to take it personally that this "grand scale composer" had only one public concert in his life. "He was not an extroverted composer. His works are not outgoing. As a listener you have to put yourself in a receptive mood of tranquillity and put yourself on his wavelength." Like Schubert, like Schiff.
"Of all the music I know, Schubert's moves me to tears. Schubert said there is no such thing as happy music and while his music is infinitely sad and tragic, it does not depress me. It lifts me up." It was one of several civilised paradoxes that extended to the state of classical music. "There is a separation of new and old, of serious and light music," he complained. Yet he has recorded no new music and didn't hesitate in denying that he's an entertainer. "A concert is not an entertainment. It should be a deep emotional and intellectual; experience from which the listener takes something home to feel and to think about.
"I don't think Schubert wanted to be particularly original," Schiff says. "Today it's one of the main criteria for an artist. You cannot be deliberately original. You have to be true and honest to yourself. You cannot be deliberately different." Schiff is different in his indifference to the publicity game. To hell with shifting product if the price is showmanship. It's not his fault that CD collections have been completed and that yet another set of Beethoven concertos is unlikely to sell the 60,000 copies that Perahia did when Haitink last conducted them in 1984.
Schiff sees his work as inching along a tradition he defines as: conservative and hierarchical. "Performers are second class citizens to composers," he says.
"They're important citizens because the music will not be listened to without us. To me a musical masterpiece has a number of possibilities of approach, and there is a certain frame in which performers have liberty to move around. It's like the law in life. If there is anarchy, then chaos breaks out."
And would he say the star system is a kind of anarchy?
"Most certainly. Yes."
