THE first phone call to set up an interview with Mitsuko Uchida didn't leave me feeling optimistic about the outcome. The pianist, explained her agent, would rather do it on the phone. I would only do it in person, in London, where she lives. So much is lost on the phone gestures, facial expressions, the meaning of silences, personality that telephone interviews with strangers have always seemed to me something of a quixotic undertaking.
There the matter rested for a day or two, in the limbo of "Let's see what we can do".
When the offer came back, of one hour on a specified date some three weeks before Uchida's Dublin concert, it was almost like a challenge, an attempt to see how seriously I would respond. In the circumstances, how could I refuse?
And, sure enough, when I turned up on Mitsuko Uchida's doorstep at the appointed hour in a bitterly cold, snowy London, the first subject of discussion was the face to face interview . . . all that travelling for such a short conversation. And, she pointed out, laughing, she was such a good talker on the phone.
She does interviews, it emerges, because they go with the territory. Her ideal working day would involve nothing but music, no repertoire to learn, no concerts or recordings to prepare for, no phone to ring. She's not one of those musicians (she has a particular unnamed young virtuoso in mind) for whom the glamour of the next big concert date is the stimulus that makes it all worthwhile. Do I realise, she asks, there are musicians who are not when you get down to it really that interested in music at all? People for whom the professional trappings or the technicalities of performance become ends in themselves? That parental ambition and pressure can be the deciding factor in the establishment of professional careers?
This discussion, going at quite a pace, is carried on while she makes tea for herself, the precision of infusion getting lost through the distraction of the discussion coffee for me, I have to specify how strong. And, throughout, my tape recorder lies untouched in my bag on the floor.
We move upstairs to a room with a small Bosendorfer grand, one wall lined with recordings and expensive audio equipment. This is not where she practices she calls it her office. Her studio with two Steinway concert grands, is across the road.
As we sit down, I face an interviewer's nightmare. Will I manage to get the tape recorder started without dissipating the momentum that's been established? Fortunately, I do. By this time (following on from musicians whose primary interest is not the music), we're talking about the great Italian pianist, Michelangeli. Since he's dead, she allows herself to chide him, recalling a moment when he took time, at the expense of the music, purely for the purpose of balancing a chord in a particular way.
"Basically, what he was doing for me was the highest art form, but it was a self indulgence. But on the other hand, he did it so well, most people didn't notice, and if the repertoire was right for him, wow, it was staggering she instances Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit and the Scarlatti sonatas ("the most beautiful things you ever heard") and trawls through memory to recall virtually the entire repertoire she heard Michelangeli play in conceit, musing over her good fortune in having managed to hear so often a performer so notorious to hid cancellations.
TO be a musician is not a profession, it's a commitment," declares Uchida. To be a musician, if you don't love it sooooooo much, is some sort of misunderstanding about life and about music." It's not something, we agree you can just decide to do. It either happens or it doesn't.
"It must happen against all odds," she says. Everybody is against it. You came from the wrong background. And then you landed in the wrong places. And yet if you still have to be, you have to be, and that's that. And you are lucky then if you can make you living out of playing.
If she couldn't play the instrument she confesses she would still be involved with music only", though "in what form is more difficult to tell".
In going through the above list of possible hurdles, she may be thinking of her own particular circumstances, born into a non musical family in post war Japan. She had a head start over other Japanese youngsters, as there was a family record collection, rescued against all the odds (and in preference to items of more immediately practical use) by her mother in the evacuation of Tokyo. Her father, a diplomat spent the war in Germany, and her mother, lonely, played records for her children (the unborn ones, too), wearing out in the process a disc of Schnabel playing a Mozart piano sonata. You can draw your own conclusions about the fact that Mitsuko Uchida is still best known for he recordings of the complete Mozart piano sonatas and concertos.
Piano tuition began early, at the age of three when, in the storybook manner of the musically gifted, young Mitsuko showed more interest in her older brother's lessons than he did. "My parents being Japanese of their generation, would not have had any inkling of what it means to be a musician. To them, a daughter was somebody who was going to get married between the age of 20 and 25 and produce some grandchildren, and that's the end of the story.
"It was very strongly discouraged to love anything when I was a child. You were to obey and you were to fulfil your duty. So, as you went to school without questioning, you went to you piano teacher without questioning too much. It was basically education. Enjoying and loving was so discouraged as much as
Therefore, I hid it if I loved a piece, and I played lots of pieces that I dad like that much or that I didn't understand. And it was clear to me all the time what I didn't understand. I kept some where in my memory all the dissatisfactions of my musical encounters, experiences, as well as life, because music is ultimately what life is. The more I solved them, the more I understood, the more I got hold of it, the more interesting it became." Now, she says, it has reached a stage where it is beyond interesting".
At some stage in her teens, when she was living in Vienna, she realised that she was "hooked" on music. "That I knew from somewhere between 15 and 18, and it was becoming worse all the time. It is progressive, you are hooked more and more The more you can do, the more you can express, the more you know, the more interesting it becomes." By the age of 20, it was "completely inevitable, whether I could make my living out of it or not, I was going to try to be a pianist. And if I could not make my living, then I would teach or something."
The importance of music "is that the greatest music brings certain experiences, ultimate experiences about life and death, in a different form. Each person does it differently. Some music does not even try to do it. But some music does even if it's not trying to do it, it does." The greatest of poetry, she suggests, "is level with the greatest of music, but with the poetry you have the feeling as if you understood, and with music, very often, not even that is there, so in a way it's stronger".
UCHIDA'S Dublin programme the first set of Schubert Imprompus Schoenberg's Suite Op 25 and the late, great Schubert Sonata in B flat 5 part of a larger undertaking which presents the complete piano music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern (which amounts to about 75 minutes) spread over five evenings, with two huge Schubert items" in each concert.
Schoenberg is for Uchida, first and foremost a Viennese composer. "There is the Viennese lilt in the melodic line and that love of 3/4 rhythm, which is basically a waltz. Schoenberg's Piano Concerto is a slow waltz, the first movement. The last movement of that piece is, anyway, an 18th century Allegretto, like a Mozart piano concerto last movement, only wrong notes, that's all."
The Schoenberg in the Dublin programme is one of the hardest, seemingly ugliest but possibly one of the strongest pieces he wrote. Therefore, it is riveting. I used to hate it, because I didn't like his style. I used to think, this is so ugly, who wants to play this? It is one piece I might not have touched had I not played the lot. I'm glad I did, because when you know it well enough, that piece truly is a glorious composition. It's one of the strongest and most rigorous compositions he has written
The difference between Schubert and Schoenberg will, she says, be obvious to everybody and she's hoping that the close conjunction will highlight some of the links.
In spite of its brevity, our talk pulls in a wide range of topics the neglect of music within the education system in Britain, Uchida's lack of contact with Japanese music (she feels no deprivation, "the music that I'm dealing with has so much I'm still completely in awe of the quality as well as the quantity there is"), her view of the 20th century as a crossroads in composition, her pianist's nightmare of difficult acoustics and the badly prepared instruments which are to be encountered "almost everywhere" (it's as if a ballet dancer would have to dance on a floor full of holes," she says).
Yet and she says it seriously Uchida describes herself as someone who has very little to say. Ultimately a musician is somebody who says it all in the music. Beyond that, everything is an accessory.
